Plinio Corréa de Oliveira
Revolution
and
_Counter-Revolution
“If the Revolution is disorder,
the Counter-Revolution is the
restoration of Order.”
Revolution
and
Counter-Revolution
Plinio Corréa de Oliveira
Revolution
and
Counter-Revolution
The American Society for the Defense of
Tradition, Family and Property
Spring Grove, Penn. 17362
Originally published as Revolugdo e Contra-Revolucdo, in
Catolicismo, April 1959 (Parts | and II) and Jamary 1977 (Part III)
Third English Edition (5th printing 2014)
Copyright © 1993 The American Society for the Defense of
Tradition, Family and Property® (TFP*)
First English edition 1974. Second English edition 1980
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording
or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
written permission from The American Society for the Defense of
Tradition, Family and Property (TFP).
The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and
Property ® is a registered name of The Foundation for a Christian
Civilization, Inc.
The American Society for the Defense of
Tradition, Family and Property (TFP)
1358 Jefferson Road
Spring Grove, Penn. 17362
(717) 225-7147
www.tfp.org
ISBN 13: 978-1-877905-17-9
ISBN 10: 1-877905-17-8
Library of Congress Catalogue Card No. 93-073496
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
Partl
The Revolution
CHAPTER |
The Crisis of Contemporary Man
CHAPTER II
The Crisis of Western and Christian Man
CHAPTER HI
Characteristics of This Crisis
1. IT Is UNIVERSAL
2. IT Is ONE
3. Ir Is TOTAL
4. IT Is DOMINANT
5. Iv Is PROCESSIVE
A. The Decay of the Middle Ages
B. The Pseudo-Reformation and
the Renaissance
C. The French Revolution
D. Communism
E. Monarchy, Republic, and Religion
F. Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and
Dictatorship
CHAPTER IV
The Metamorphoses of the Revolutionary Process
XV
10
11
11
11
12
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
20
24
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER V
The Three Depths of the Revolution:
In the Tendencies, in the Ideas, and in the Facts
1. THE REVOLUTION IN THE TENDENCIES
2. THE REVOLUTION IN THE IDEAS
3, THE REVOLUTION IN THE FACTS
4. OBSERVATIONS
A. The Depths of the Revolution Are
Not Identical to Chronological Stages
B. The Differentiation of the
Three Depths of the Revolution
C. The Revolutionary Process Is Not Irrepressible
CHAPTER V1
The March of the Revolution
1. THE DRIVING FORCE OF THE REVOLUTION
A. The Revolution and the Disordered Tendencies
B. The Paroxysms of the Revolution
Are Fully Present in Its Seeds
C. The Revolution Aggravates Its Own Causes
2. THE APPARENT INTERVALS OF THE REVOLUTION
3. THE MARCH FROM REFINEMENT TO REFINEMENT
4. THE HARMONIC SPEEDS OF THE REVOLUTION
A. The Rapid March
B. The Slow March
C. How These Speeds Harmonize
5. OBJECTIONS REFUTED
A. Slow-speed Revolutionaries and
“Semi-counterrevolutionaries”
B. Protestant Monarchies and Catholic Republics
C. Protestant Austerity
D. The Single Front of the Revolution
6. THE AGENTS OF THE REVOLUTION:
FREEMASONRY AND OTHER SECRET FORCES
CHAPTER VII
The Essence of the Revolution
1. THE REVOLUTION PAR EXCELLENCE
A. Meaning of the Word Revolution
B. Bloody and Unbloody Revolution
26
26
27
27
27
2
28
28
29
29
29
30
30
30
31
31
31
32
32
33
33
34
35
36
37
40
40
40
40
C. The Amplitude of the Revolution
D. The Revolution Par Excellence
E. The Destruction of the Order Par Excellence
2. REVOLUTION AND LEGITIMACY
A. Legitimacy Par Excellence
B. Catholic Culture and Civilization
C. The Sacral Character of Catholic Civilization
D. Culture and Civilization Par Excellence
E. Illegitimacy Par Excellence
3. PRIDE AND SENSUALITY AND THE
METAPHYSICAL VALUES OF THE REVOLUTION
A. Pride and Egalitarianism
B. Sensuality and Liberalism
CHAPTER VIII
The Intelligence, the Will, and the Sensibility
in the Determination of Human Acts
1, FALLEN NATURE, GRACE, AND FREE WILL
2. THE GERM OF THE REVOLUTION
3. REVOLUTION AND BAD FAITH
CHAPTER IX
The “Semi-counterrevolutionary” Is Also a
Son of the Revolution
CHAPTER X
Culture, Arts, and Ambiences in the Revolution
1. CULTURE
2. ARTS
3. AMBIENCES
4. THE HISTORICAL ROLE OF THE ARTS AND
AMBIENCES IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
CHAPTER XI
The Revolution on Sin and Redemption,
and the Revolutionary Utopia
1. THE REVOLUTION DENIES SIN AND THE REDEMPTION
2. HISTORICAL EXEMPLIFICATION: THE DENIAL OF
SIN IN LIBERALISM AND SOCIALISM
60
65
66
vill
CONTENTS
A. The Immaculate Conception of the Individual
B. The Immaculate Conception of the
Masses and the State
3. REDEMPTION BY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY:
THE REVOLUTIONARY UTOPIA
CHAPTER XII
The Pacifist and Antimilitarist Character
of the Revolution
1. SCIENCE WILL BRING AN END TO War,
THE MILITARY, AND POLICE
2. Tig DOCTRINAL INCOMPATIBILITY BETWEEN
THE REVOLUTION AND THE UNIFORM
3. THE TEMPERAMENT OF THE REVOLUTION Is
CONTRARY TO THE MILITARY LIFE
Part I
The Counter-Revolution
CHAPTER I
The Counter-Revolution Is a Reaction
1. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION: A SPECIFIC
AND DIRECT FIGHT AGAINST THE REVOLUTION
2. THE NOBILITY OF THIS REACTION
3. A REACTION TURNED AGAINST
PRESENT-DAY ADVERSARIES
4. THE MODERNITY AND INTEGRITY OF
THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
CHAPTER II
Reaction and Historical Immobility
1. WHat Is To BE RESTORED
2. Wuat Is To BE INNOVATED
CHAPTER III
The Counter-Revolution and the
Craving After Novelties
1, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS TRADITIONALIST
66
67
67
69
69
70
70
73
73
73
74
74
75
75
75
77
77
A. Reason
B. The Smoking Wick
C. False Traditionalism
2, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS CONSERVATIVE
3. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS AN ESSENTIAL
CONDITION FOR AUTHENTIC PROGRESS
CHAPTER IV
What Is a Counter-Revolutionary?
1. IN ACTUALITY
2. IN POTENTIALITY
CHAPTER V
The Counter-Revolution’s Tactics
1. IN RELATION TO THE ACTUAL
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY
A. Individual Action
B. Combined Action
2. IN RELATION TO THE POTENTIAL
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY
3. IN RELATION TO THE REVOLUTIONARY
A. The Counter-Revolutionary Initiative
B. The Revolutionary Counteroffensive
4. ELITES AND THE MASSES IN THE
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY TACTICS
CHAPTER VI
The Counter-Revolution’s Means of Action
1. A PREFERENCE FOR GREAT MEANS OF ACTION
2. THE USE OF MODEST MEANS: THEIR EFFICACY
CHAPTER VII
Obstacles to the Counter-Revolution
1. PITFALLS To BE AVOIDED AMONG
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES
2, SLOGANS OF THE REVOLUTION
A. “The Counter-Revolution Is Out of Date”
B. “The Counter-Revolution Is Negativistic”
C. “The Counter-Revolutionary Is Argumentative”
ix
77
78
79
79
79
81
81
82
83
83
84
84
84
85
85
86
86
88
88
88
90
90
91
91
92
92
3. WRONG ATTITUDES IN FACE OF
CONTENTS
THE REVOLUTION’S SLOGANS 94
A. Ignoring Revolutionary Slogans 94
B. Eliminating the Polemical Aspects of
Counter-Revolutionary Action 94
CHAPTER VIII
The Processive Character of the
Counter-Revolution, and the
Counter-Revolutionary “Shock” 96
1. THERE IS A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS 96
2. TYPICAL ASPECTS OF THE
REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS 96
A. In the Rapid March 96
B. In the Slow March 97
3. How To DESTROY THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS 98
A. The Many Ways of the Holy Ghost 98
B. Nothing Should Be Hidden 98
C. The “Shock” of the Great Conversions 99
D. The Likelihood of This Shock in Our Days 101
E. Showing the Whole Face of the Revolution 101
F. Pointing Out the Mctaphysical Aspects of the
Counter-Revolution 102
G. The Two Stages of the Counter-Revolution 102
CHAPTER IX
The Driving Force of the Counter-Revolution 103
1. VIRTUE AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 103
2. SUPERNATURAL LIFE AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 104
3. THE INVINCIBILITY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION 104
CHAPTER X
The Counter-Revolution, Sin, and the Redemption 105
1. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION SHOULD REVIVE
THE NOTION OF GOOD AND EVIL 105
2, How to REVIVE THE NOTION OF GOOD AND EVIL 105
CHAPTER XI
The Counter-Revolution and Temporal Society 107
1, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND
SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS
A. Works of Charity, Social Service,
Associations of Employers, Workers,
and So Forth
B. The Struggle Against Communism
2. CHRISTENDOM AND THE UNIVERSAL REPUBLIC
3. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND NATIONALISM
4. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND MILITARISM
CHAPTER XII
The Church and the Counter-Revolution
1. THE Cuurcu Is Mucu HIGHER AND FAR
BROADER THAN THE REVOLUTION AND
THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
2. THE CHURCH HAS THE GREATEST INTEREST IN
CRUSHING THE REVOLUTION
3. THE CHURCH Is A FUNDAMENTALLY
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY FORCE
4. THE CHURCH IS THE GREATEST
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY FORCE
5. THE CHURCH Is THE SOUL OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
6. THE IDEAL OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS
To EXALT THE CHURCH
7. IN A Way, THE PURVIEW OF THE
COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS BROADER ‘THAN
THE ECCLESIASTICAL AMBIT
8. WHETHER EVERY CATHOLIC SHOULD BE
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY
A. The Implicit Counter-Revolutionary
B. The Modernity of a Counter-Revolutionary
Explicitness
C. The Explicit Counter-Revolutionary
D. Counter-Revolutionary Action That Does Not
Constitute an Apostolate
9. CATHOLIC ACTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
10. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND NON-CATHOLICS
114
114
116
116
116
117
117
117
118
118
118
119
120
120
120
xii CONTENTS
Part 11
Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Twenty Years After
CHAPTER I
The Revolution: A Process in Continual
Transformation
1. REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE
TFPs: TWENTY YEARS OF ACTION AND COMBAT
2. IN A WORLD IN CONTINUOUS AND RAPID
TRANSFORMATION, IS REVOLUTION AND
COUNTER-REVOLUTION STILL CURRENT?
THE ANSWER IS AFFIRMATIVE
CHAPTER If
The Apogee and Crisis of the Third Revolution
1. THE APOGEE OF THE THIRD REVOLUTION
A. On the Road to Its Apogee, the Third Revolution
Studiously Avoided Total and Useless Adventures
B. Adventure in This Revolution’s Next Stages?
2, UNANTICIPATED OBSTACLES TO THE THIRD
REVOLUTION’S USE OF CLASSIC METHODS
A. The Decline of Persuasive Power
B. The Decline in the Capacity of Leadership
C. Objection: The Communist Success in
Italy and France
3. METAMORPHOSED HATRED AND VIOLENCE GENERATE
TOTAL REVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
A. The Two Great Goals of Revolutionary
Psychological Warfare
B. Total Revolutionary Psychological Warfare:
A Result of the Third Revolution’s Apogee
and Current Problems
4. THE THIRD REVOLUTION’S PSYCHOLOGICAL
OFFENSIVE WITHIN THE CHURCH
A. The Second Vatican Council
B. The Church: Today’s Center of
Conflict Between the Revolution
and the Counter-Revolution
125
125
127
129
129
132
133
136
136
137
139
141
143
144
144
144
150
C. Reactions Based on Revolution
and Counter-Revolution
D. The Usefulness of the Action of the TFPs
and Like Organizations Inspired by
Revolution and Counter-Revolution
5. AN ASSESSMENT OF TWENTY YEARS OF THE THIRD
REVOLUTION ACCORDING TO THE CRITERIA OF
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
CHAPTER III
The Aborning Fourth Revolution
1. THE FoURTH REVOLUTION FORETOLD
BY THE AUTHORS OF THE THIRD REVOLUTION
2. THE FOURTH REVOLUTION AND TRIBALISM:
AN EVENTUALITY? -
A. The Fourth Revolution and the Preternatural
B. Structuralism and Pre-tribal Tendencies
C. An Unpretentious Contribution
D. The Opposition of the Banal
E. Ecclesiastical Tribalism and Pentecostalism
3. THE DUTY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES IN
FACE OF THE ABORNING FOURTH REVOLUTION
CONCLUSION
POSTFACE
INDEX
APPROBATIONS
xill
151
153
154
156
157
158
159
159
161
161
162
164
167
169
177
181
FOREWORD
Since its first publication in the Brazilian cultural jour-
nal Catolicismo in 1959, Revolution and Counter-Revo-
lution has gone through a number of editions in Portu-
guese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish.
The present edition is the third to be published in the
United States. It includes recent commentaries on Revo-
lution and Counter-Revolution’s third part, which was
added by the author in 1976.
Revolution and Countér-Revolution, the basic book and
inspiration of the many autonomous Societies for the
Defense of Tradition, Family and Property and like or-
ganizations, contains principles of wisdom that can effica-
ciously stop the disintegration of civilization in the world
today.
The author of this work is the world-famous Brazilian
Catholic philosopher Prof. Plinio Corréa de Oliveira.
Over the years he has written numerous works that have
received noteworthy ecclesiastical approbation.
For example, in the late 1940s, his Em Defesa da Acado
Catolica, denouncing the danger presented by leftists
encysted in the Catholic Action movement, prompted a
letter of praise from Msgr. Montini, then substitute for the
Vatican secretary of state, written on behalf of Pius XII.
In another work, The Church and the Communist State:
The Impossible Coexistence (1963), the author proved
that a Catholic could not view the establishment of a
communist regime in his country as morally acceptable.
The Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and
Universities called this work “a most faithful echo of all
the Documents of the supreme Magisterium of the
Xvi _ FOREWORD
Church, including the luminous encyclicals Mater et Ma-
gistra of John XXIII and Ecclesiam Suam of Paul VI.”
In 1992, he wrote Nobility and Analogous Traditional
Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XI, contrasting two
models of socicty. The first model is Christian, founded
on the idea that God wills proportional and harmonic
inequalities among the social classes, all of whose mem-
bers are entitled to at least sufficient living conditions.
The second model is based on the erroneous idea that all
inequality is unjust. The book has been acclaimed in
cloquent letters by Silvio Cardinal Oddi, Mario Luigi
Cardinal Ciappi, Alfons M. Cardinal Stickler, theologian
Fr. Raimondo Spiazzi, Thomist Fr. Victorino Rodriguez
y Rodriguez, and canonist Fr. Anastasio Gutiérrez.
Yet, the most significant of Professor Corréa de
Oliveira’s works is Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
Its significance was quickly recognized. Eugene Cardinal
Tisserant wrote: “The theme of this study is of the highest
importance for the time in which we live. . . . The analysis
made by Professor Corréa de Oliveira is clear, precise and
accurate. . . . It will be of interest to a considerable number
of our fellow citizens. I congratulate the author of this
magnificent work.” Thomas Cardinal Tien, of China,
stated: “Those of us who personally suffer from the effects
of communism are well able to calculate the accuracy and
urgent necessity of such a study.”
All the editions of Revolution and Counter-Revolution
have concluded with these words:
We have not the slightest doubt in our heart about
any of the theses that constitute this work. Nevertheless,
we subject them all unrestrictedly to the judgment of
the Vicar of Christ and are disposed to renounce
immediately any one of them if it depart even slightly
from the teaching of the Holy Church, our Mother, the
Ark of Salvation, and the Gate of Heaven.
XVIi
Over forty years have passed since this statement was
first published. In the meantime, Revolution and Counter-
Revolution has been spread throughout the world without
any of its theses being challenged as contrary to the
Church’s Magisterium. This fact corroborates the earlier
approbations and testifies to the integrity of this enduring
work.
To this must be added another fact of enormous gravity.
In the third part of the present work, the author states that
the main battleground of the struggle between anti-order
(the Revolution) and order (the Counter-Revolution) is no
longer civil society but the Holy Church herself.
Such a terrible state of affairs is of first concern to
Catholics. But it is also of concern to all men of good will,
for without the influence of the Church, temporal society
will never rise from the prostration to which it has been
reduced by the same enemy: the Revolution.
People seeking the most effective way to combat this
enemy will welcome a book that provides the principles
needed for the pursuit of this struggle.
The American Society for the Defense
of Tradition, Family and Property
(TFP)
INTRODUCTION
Today, Catolicismo publishes its hundredth issue.’ To
mark the event it wished to give this issue a special note
that might deepen the already profound communication of
soul between it and its readers.
For this, nothing seemed more appropriate than the
publication of an essay on the subject of Revolution and
Counter-Revolution.
The selection of this subject is easy to explain. Catoli-
cismo is a combative jousnal. As such, it must be judged
principally in relation to the end toward which its combat
strives. Now, whom, precisely, does it wish to combat?
A reading of its pages may provide an insufficiently
defined impression in this regard. One frequently finds
therein refutations of communism, socialism, totalitarian-
ism, liberalism, liturgicism, “Maritainism,” and various
other “isms.” Nevertheless, one would not say that any
one of these has been emphasized over the others to such
an extent that Catolicismo could be defined by it alone.
For example, it would be an exaggeration to affirm that
Catolicismo is a specifically anti-Protestant or anti-
socialist paper. One would say, then, that our journal has a
plurality of ends. However, one perceives that, in the
perspective in which it places itself, all of these aims
have, as it were, a common denominator, and this is the
objective our paper always has before it.
What is this common denominator? A doctrine? A
force? A current of opinion? Clearly, an elucidation of this
point would help explain the depths of the whole work of
1. This introduction was first published in the April 1959 issue of the
Brazilian journal Cafolicismo.
=, INTRODUCTION
doctrinal formation that Catolicismo has been doing in the
course of these one hundred months.
However, the benefit that can be derived from the study
of Revolution and Counter-Revolution gocs far beyond
this limited objective.
To demonstrate this, we need but glance at the religious
scene of our country. Statistically speaking, the situation
of Catholics is excellent: According to the latest official
data, we comprise 94 percent of the population. If all of us
were the Catholics we should be, Brazil would now be one
of the most admirable Catholic powers to have arisen in
the course of the twenty centuries of the life of the Church.
Why, then, are we so far from this ideal? Can anyone
truthfully say that the main cause of our present situation
is spiritualism, Protestantism, atheism, or communism?
No! It is something else, impalpable and subtle, and as
penetrating as a powerful and fearful radiation. All feel its
effects, but few know its name or nature.
As we write these words, our thoughts transcend the
frontiers of Brazil, to our dear sister nations of Hispanic
America, and thence to all Catholic nations. In each, this
same evil exerts its undefined but overwhelming sway,
producing symptoms of tragic grandeur. Consider this
example among others. In a letter written in 1956 regard-
ing the National Day of Thanksgiving, Msgr. Angelo
Dell’ Acqua, substitute for the Vatican secretary of state,
said to Carlos Carmelo Cardinal de Vasconcellos Motta of
S4o Paulo: “Because of the religious agnosticism of the
states,” there has been “‘a decline or almost loss of the
sense of the Church in modern society.” Now what enemy
struck this terrible blow against the Bride of Christ? What
is the common cause of this and so many other concomi-
tant and like evils? What shall we call it? What are the
means by which it acts? What is the secret of its victory?
How can we combat it successfully?
Obviously, it would be difficult to find a more timely
subject.
This terrible enemy has a name: It is called the Revo-
lution.
Its profound cause is an explosion of pride and sensu-
ality that has inspired, not one system, but, rather, a whole
chain of ideological systems. Their wide acceptance gave
rise to the three great revolutions in the history of the
West: the Pseudo-Reformation, the French Revolution, and
Communism.’
Pride leads to hatred of all superiority and, thus, to the
affirmation that inequality is an evil in itself at all levels,
principally at the metaphysical and religious ones. This is
the egalitarian aspect of the Revolution.
Sensuality, per se, tends to sweep aside all barriers. It
does not accept restraints and leads to revolt against all
authority and law, divine or human, ecclesiastical or civil.
This is the liberal aspect of the Revolution.
Both aspects, which in the final analysis have a meta-
physical character, seem contradictory on many occasions.
But they are reconciled in the Marxist utopia of an anar-
chic paradise where a highly evolved mankind, “emanci-
pated” from religion, would live in utmost order without
political authority in total freedom. This, however, would
not give rise to any inequality.
The Pseudo-Reformation was a first revolution. It im-
planted, in varying degrees, the spirit of doubt, religious
2. Cf. Leo XIII, apostolic letter Parvenu a la vingt-cinquieme annee,
March 19, 1902, in Fr. John J. Wynne, S.J., The Great Encyclical Letters
of Pope Leo XIII (New York: Benziger Bros., 1903), pp. 559-560.
4 _ INTRODUCTION
liberalism, and ecclesiastical egalitarianism in the differ-
ent sects it produced.
The French Revolution came next. It was the triumph
of egalitarianism in two fields: the religious field in the
form of atheism, speciously labeled as secularism; and the
political field through the false maxim that all inequality
is an injustice, all authority a danger, and freedom the
supreme good.
Communism is the transposition of these maxims to the
socioeconomic field.
These three revolutions are episodes of one single
Revolution, within which socialism, liturgicism, the poli-
tique de la main tendue (policy of the extended hand), and
the like are only transitional stages or attenuated manifes-
tations.
Naturally, a process so profound, vast, and prolonged
cannot develop without encompassing every domain of
human activity, such as culture, art, laws, customs, and
institutions.
A detailed study of this process in all its areas of
development is much beyond the scope of this essay.
Here—limiting ourselves to one vein of this vast mat-
ter—we attempt to sketch summarily the outlines of the
immense avalanche that is the Revolution, to give it an
adequate name, and to indicate very succinctly its pro-
found causes, the agents promoting it, the essential ele-
ments of its doctrine, the respective importance of the
various fields in which it acts, the vigor of its dynamism,
and the mechanism of its expansion. In a similar way, we
then treat analogous points pertaining to the Counter-
Revolution, and study some of the conditions for its
victory.
in
Even so, in each of these themes, we had to restrict
ourselves to explaining what in our view are presently the
most useful elements for enlightening our readers and
assisting them in the fight against the Revolution. We had
to leave out many points of capital importance but of less
pressing urgency.
This work, as we have said, is a simple ensemble of
theses by which one may better know the spirit and
program of Catolicismo. It would go beyond its natural
proportions if it included a complete demonstration of
each affirmation. We have limited ourselves to developing
the minimum argumentation necessary for showing the
relationship between the various theses and giving a
panoramic view of a whole side of our doctrinal positions.
* * *
This essay may serve as a survey. What exactly do the
readers of Catolicismo in Brazil and elsewhere (who are
certainly among those most opposed to the Revolution)
think about the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution?
Although our propositions encompass only part of the
subject, we hope they will lead each of our readers to ask
himself this question and to send us his answer, which we
would welcome with great interest.
Part lI
The Revolution
CHAPTER I
The Crisis of Contemporary Man
The many crises shaking the world today—those of the
State, family, economy, culture, and so on—are but mul-
tiple aspects of a single fundamental crisis whose field of
action is man himself. In other words, these crises have
their root in the most profound problems of the soul, from
whence they spread to the whole personality of present-
day man and all his activities.
CHAPTER II
The Crisis of Western and
Christian Man
Above all, this is a crisis of Western and Christian man,
that is, Europeans and their descendants, Canadians,
Americans, Latin Americans, and Australians. We will
study it especially as such. It also affects other peoples to
the degree that Western influence has reached and taken
root among them. In their case, the crisis is interwoven
with problems peculiar to their respective cultures and
civilizations and to the clash of these with the positive or
negative elements of Western culture and civilization.
CHAPTER III
Characteristics of This Crisis
However profound the factors that diversify this crisis
from country to country, it always has five major charac-
teristics.
1. Iv Is UNIVERSAL
This crisis is universal. There is no people that is not
affected by it to a greater or lesser degree.
2. IT Is ONE
This crisis is one. It is not a range of crises developing
side by side, independently in each country, interrelated
because of certain analogies of varying relevance.
When a fire breaks out in a forest, one cannot regard it
as a thousand autonomous and parallel fires of a thousand
trees in close proximity. The unity of the phenomenon of
combustion acts on the living unity that is the forest.
Moreover, the great force of expansion of the flames
results from the heat in which the innumerable flames of
12 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
the different trees intermingle and multiply. Indeed,
everything helps to make the forest fire a single fact,
totally encompassing the thousand partial fires, however
different from one another in their accidents.
Western Christendom constituted a single whole that
transcended the several Christian countries without
absorbing them. A crisis occurred within this living unity,
eventually affecting the whole through the combined and
even fused heat of the ever more numerous local crises
that across the centuries have never ceased to intertwine
and augment one another. Consequently, Christendom, as
a family of officially Catholic states, has long ceased to
exist. The Western and Christian peoples are mere rem-
nants of it. And now they are all agonizing under the action
of this same evil.
3. IT Is TOTAL
In any given country, this crisis develops in such a
profound level of problems that it spreads or unfolds, by
the very order of things, in all powers of the soul, all fields
of culture, and, in the end, all realms of human action.
4. Ir Is DOMINANT
Considered superficially, the events of our days seem a
chaotic and inextricable tangle. From many points of view,
they are indeed.
However, one can discern profoundly consistent and
vigorous resultants of this conjunction of so many disor-
derly forces when considering them from the standpoint of
the great crisis we are analyzing.
Indeed, under the impulse of these forces in delirium,
the Western nations are being gradually driven toward a
state of affairs which is taking the same form in all of them
and is diametrically opposed to Christian civilization.
CHAPTER III 13
Thus, this crisis is like a queen whom all the forces of
chaos serve as efficient and docile vassals.
5. Ir Is PROCESSIVE
This crisis is not a spectacular, isolated episode. It
constitutes, on the contrary, a critical process already five
centuries old. It is a long chain of causes and effects that,
having originated at a certain moment with great intensity
in the deepest recesses of the soul and the culture of
Western man, has been producing successive convulsions
since the fifteenth century. The words of Pius XII about a
subtle and mysterious enemy of the Church can fittingly
be applied to this process:
It is to be found everywhere and among everyone; it
can be both violent and astute. In these last centuries, it
has attempted to disintegrate the intellectual, moral, and
social unity in the mysterious organism of Christ. It has
sought nature without gracc, reason without faith,
freedom without authority, and, at times, authority
without freedom. It is an “enemy” that has become
more and more apparent with an absence of scruples
that still surprises: Christ yes; the Church no!
Afterwards: God yes; Christ no! Finally the impious
shout: God is dead and, even, God never existed! And
behold now the attempt to build the structure of the
world on foundations which we do not hesitate to indi-
cate as the main causes of the threat that hangs over
humanity: economy without God, law without God,
politics without God.'
This process should not be viewed as an altogether
1. Pius XII, allocution to the Union of Men of the Italian Catholic Action
on October 12, 1952, Discorsi e radiomessagi di Sua Santita Pio XII
(Vatican: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1953), vol. 14, p. 359.
14 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
fortuitous sequence of causes and effects that has taken
place unexpectedly. Already at its inception, this crisis was
strong enough to carry out all its potentialities. It is still
strong enough to cause, by means of supreme upheavals,
the ultimate destructions that are its logical outcome.
Influenced and conditioned in different ways by all
sorts of extrinsic factors (cultural, social, economic, eth-
nic, geographic, and others), it follows paths that are
sinuous at times. It nonetheless never ccases to progress
toward its tragic end.
A. The Decay of the Middle Ages
In the Introduction, we outlined the main features of
this process. It would not be amiss to add some details.
In the fourteenth century, a transformation of mentality
began to take place in Christian Europe; in the course of
the fifteenth century, it became ever more apparent. The
thirst for earthly pleasures became a burning desire. Di-
versions became more and more frequent and sumptuous,
increasingly engrossing men. In dress, manners, lan-
guage, literature, and art, the growing yearning for a life
filled with delights of fancy and the senses produced
progressive manifestations of sensuality and softness.
Little by little, the seriousness and austerity of former
times lost their value. The whole trend was toward gaiety,
affability, and festiveness. Hearts began to shy away from
the love of sacrifice, from true devotion to the Cross, and
from the aspiration to sanctity and eternal life. Chivalry,
formerly one of the highest expressions of Christian aus-
terity, became amorous and sentimental. The literature of
love invaded all countries. Excesses of luxury and the
consequent eagerness for gain spread throughout all
social classes.
Penetrating intellectual circles, this moral climate pro-
CHAPTER III . 15
duced clear manifestations of pride, such as a taste for
ostentatious and vain disputes, for inconsistent tricks of
argument, and for fatuous exhibitions of learning. It
praised old philosophical tendencies over which Scholas-
ticism had triumphed. As the former zeal for the integrity
of the Faith waned, these tendencies reappeared in new
guises. The absolutism of legists, who adorned themselves
with a conceited knowledge of Roman law, was favorably
received by ambitious princes. And, all the while, in great
and small alike, there was a fading of the will of yore to
keep the royal power within its proper bounds as in the
days of Saint Louis of France and Saint Ferdinand of
Castile.
B. The Pseudo-Reformation and the Renaissance
This new state of soul contained a powerful although
more or less unacknowledged desire for an order of things
fundamentally different from that which had reached its
heights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
An exaggerated and often delirious admiration for an-
tiquity served as a mcans for the expression of this desire.
In order to avoid direct confrontations with the old me-
dieval tradition, humanism and the Renaissance frequent-
ly sought to relegate the Church, the supernatural, and the
moral values of religion to a secondary plane. At the same
time, the human type inspired by the pagan moralists was
introduced by these movements as an ideal in Europe. This
human type and the culture and civilization consistent with
it were truly the precursors of the greedy, sensual, secular-
ist, and pragmatic man of our days and of the materialistic
culture and civilization into which we are sinking deeper
and deeper. Efforts to effect a Christian Renaissance did
not manage to crush in the germinal stage the factors that
led to the gradual triumph of neopaganism.
16 PART J, THE REVOLUTION
In some parts of Europe, this neopaganism developed
without leading to formal apostasy. It found significant
resistance. Even when it became established within souls,
it did not dare ask them—at least in the beginning—to
formally break with the Faith.
However, in other countries, it openly attacked the
Church. Pride and sensuality, whose satisfaction is the
pleasure of pagan life, gave rise to Protestantism.
Pride begot the spirit of doubt, free examination, and
naturalistic interpretation of Scripture. It produced insur-
rection against ecclesiastical authority, expressed in all
sects by the denial of the monarchical character of the
Universal Church, that is to say, by a revolt against the
Papacy. Some of the more radical sects also denied what
could be called the higher aristocracy of the Church,
namely, the bishops, her princes. Others even denied the
hierarchical character of the priesthood itself by reducing
it to a mere delegation of the people, lauded as the only
true holder of priestly power.
On the moral plane, the trumph of sensuality in
Protestantism was affirmed by the suppression of ecclesi-
astical celibacy and by the introduction of divorce.
C. The French Revolution
The profound action of humanism and the Renaissance
among Catholics spread unceasingly throughout France in
a growing chain of consequences.
Favored by the weakening of piety in the faithful
caused by Jansenism and the other leavens sixteenth-cen-
tury Protestantism had unfortunately left in the Most
Christian Kingdom, this action gave rise in the eighteenth
century to a nearly universal dissolution of customs, a
frivolous and superficial way of considering things, and
a deification of carthly life that paved the way for the
gradual victory of irreligion.
CHAPTER IT 17
Doubts about the Church, the denial of the divinity of
Christ, deism, and incipient atheism marked the stages of
this apostasy.
The French Revolution was the heir of Renaissance
neopaganism and of Protestantism, with which it had a
profound affinity. It carried out a work in every respect
symmetrical to that of the Pseudo-Reformation. The Con-
stitutional Church it attempted to set up before sinking
into deism and atheism was an adaptation of the Church
of France to the spirit of Protestantism. The political work
of the French Revolution was but the transposition to the
sphere of the State of the “reform” the more radical
Protestant sects had adopted in the matter of ecclesiastical
organization:
— the revolt against the King corresponding to the
revolt against the Pope;
— the revolt of the common people against the nobles,
to the revolt of the ecclesiastical “common people,” the
faithful, against the “aristocracy” of the Church, the clergy;
— the affirmation of popular sovereignty, to the gov-
ernment of certain sects by the faithful in varying degrees.
D. Communism
Some sects arising from Protestantism transposed their
religious tendencies directly to the political field, thus
preparing the way for the republican spirit. In the seven-
teenth century, Saint Francis de Sales warned the Duke of
Savoy against these republican tendencies.’ Other sects
went even further, adopting principles that, if not commu-
nist in the full sense of the word today, were at least pre-
communist.
Out of the French Revolution came the communist
2. See Sainte-Beuve, Etudes des lundis — XVIléme siécle — Saint
Francois de Sales (Paris: Librairie Garnier, 1928), p. 364.
18 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
movement of Babeuf. Later, the nineteenth-century
schools of utopian communism and the so-called scien-
tific communism of Marx burst forth from the increas-
ingly ardent spirit of the Revolution.
And what could be more logical? The normal fruit of
deism is atheism. Sensuality, revolting against the fragile
obstacles of divorce, tends of itself toward free love.
Pride, enemy of all superiority, finally had to attack the
last inequality, that of wealth. Drunk with dreams of a
one-world republic, of the suppression of all ecclesiasti-
cal or civil authority, of the abolition of any Church, and
of the abolition of the State itself after a transitional
dictatorship of the workers, the revolutionary process
now brings us the twentieth-century neobarbarian, its
most recent and extreme product.
E. Monarchy, Republic, and Religion
To avoid any misunderstanding, it is necessary to em-
phasize that this exposition does not contain the assertion
that the republic is necessarily a revolutionary regime.
When speaking of the various forms of government, Leo
XIII made it quite clear that “each of them is good, as long
as it moves honestly toward its end, namely, the common
good, for which social authority is constituted.”
We do label as revolutionary the hostility professed
against monarchy and aristocracy on the principle that
they are essentially incompatible with human dignity and
the normal order of things. This error was condemned by
Saint Pius X in the apostolic letter Notre charge apos-
tolique, of August 25, 1910. In this letter, the great and
holy Pontiff censures the thesis of Le Sillon, that “only
democracy will inaugurate the reign of perfect justice,”
3. Leo XIII, encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes, February 16, 1892,
Bonne Presse, Paris, vol. 3, p. 116.
CHAPTER III 19
and he says: “Is this not an injury to the other forms of
government, which are thus reduced to the category of
impotent governments, acceptable only for lack of some-
thing better?’”
If one fails to consider this error, which is deeply rooted
in the process under study, one cannot completely explain
how it is that monarchy, classified by Pope Pius VI as the
best form of government in thesis (“praestantioris mo-
narchici regiminis forma’), has been the object in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a hostile worldwide
movement that has overthrown the most venerable
thrones and dynasties. From our perspective, the mass
production of republics all over the world is a typical fruit
of the Revolution and a capital aspect of it.
A person cannot be termed a revolutionary for prefer-
ring, in view of concrete and local reasons, that his
country be a democracy instead of an aristocracy or a
monarchy, provided the rights of legitimate authority be
respected. But, yes, he can be termed a revolutionary if,
led by the Revolution’s egalitarian spirit, he hates mon-
archy or aristocracy in principle and classifies them as
essentially unjust or inhuman.
From this antimonarchical and antiaristocratic hatred
are born the demagogic democracies, which combat tradi-
tion, persecute the elites, degrade the general tone of life,
and create an ambience of vulgarity that constitutes, as it
were, the dominant note of the culture and civilization—
supposing the concepts of civilization and culture can be
realized in such conditions.
How different from this revolutionary democracy is the
democracy described by Pius XII:
4. Saint Pius X, Notre charge apostolique, Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 2,
p. 618.
5. Pius VI, allocution to the Consistory of June 17, 1793, Les Enseigne-
ments Pontificaux — La Paix Intérieure de Nations, by the monks of
Solesmes (Paris: Desclée & Cie), p. 8.
20 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
History bears witness to the fact that, wherever true
democracy reigns, the life of the people is as it were
permeated with sound traditions, which it is illicit to
destroy. The primary representatives of these traditions
are first of all the leading classes, that is, the groups of
men and women or the associations that set the tone, as
we say, for the village or the city, for the region or the
entire country. Whence the existence and influence,
among all civilized peoples, of aristocratic institutions,
aristocratic in the highest sense of the word, like certain
academies of widespread and well-deserved fame. And
the nobility is also in that number.°
As can be seen, the spirit of revolutionary democracy
is quite different from the spirit that must animate a de-
mocracy according to the doctrine of the Church.
F. Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and Dictatorship
These considerations on the position of the Revolution
and of Catholic thought concerning forms of government
may lead some readers to inquire whether dictatorship is
a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary factor.
To provide a clear answer to this question—to which
many confused and even tendentious replies have been
given—it is necessary to make a distinction between
certain elements indiscriminately linked in the idea of
dictatorship as public opinion conceives of it. Mistaking
dictatorship in thesis for what it has been in practice in
our century, the public sees dictatorship as a state of
affairs in which a leader endowed with unlimited powers
governs a country. For its good, say some. For its harm,
say others. But in either case, such a state of affairs is still
a dictatorship.
6. Pius XH, allocution to the Roman Patriciate and Nobility, January 16,
1946, Discorsi e radiomessagi, vol. 7, p. 340.
CHAPTER III 21
Now, this concept involves two distinct elements:
— the omnipotence of the State;
— the concentration of state power in the hands of a
single person.
The public mind seems to focus on the second element.
Nevertheless, the first is the basic element, at least if we
see dictatorship as a state of affairs in which the public
authority, having suspended the juridical order, disposes
of all rights at its good pleasure. It is entirely evident that
a dictatorship may be exercised by a king. (A royal
dictatorship, that is, the suspension of the whole juridical
order and the unrestricted exercise of public power by the
king, is not to be confused with the Ancien Régime, in
which these guarantees existed to a considerable degree,
nor, much less, with the organic medieval monarchy.) It is
also entirely evident that a dictatorship may be exercised
by a popular chief, a hereditary aristocracy, a clan of
bankers, or even by the masses.
In itself, a dictatorship exercised by a chief or a group
of persons is neither revolutionary nor counter-revolu-
tionary. It will be either one or the other depending on the
circumstances that gave rise to it and the work it does.
This is the case whether it is in the hands of one man or
in the hands of a group.
There are circumstances that demand, for the sake of
the salus populi, a suspension of individual rights and a
greater exercise of public power. A dictatorship, therefore,
can be legitimate in certain cases.
A counter-revolutionary dictatorship—a dictatorship
completely oriented by the desire for order—must have
three essential requisites:
¢ It must suspend rights to protect order, not to subvert
it. By order we do not mean mere material tranquility, but
the disposition of things according to their end and in
accordance with the respective scale of values. This is,
22 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
then, a suspension of rights that is more apparent than real,
the sacrifice of juridical guarantees that evil elements had
abused to the detriment of order itself and of the common
good. This sacrifice is entirely directed toward the protec-
tion of the tue rights of the good.
¢ By definition, this suspension is temporary. It must
prepare circumstances for a return to order and normality
as soon as possible. A dictatorship, to the degree it is good,
proceeds to put an end to its very reason for being. The
intervention of public authority in the various sectors of
the national life must be undertaken in such a way that, as
soon as possible, each sector may live with the necessary
autonomy. Thus, each family should be allowed to do
everything it is capable of doing by its nature, being sup-
ported by higher social groups only in a subsidiary way in
what is beyond its sphere of action. These groups, in turn,
should only receive the help of their municipality in what
exceeds their normal capacity, and so on up the line in the
relations between the municipality and the region or
between the region and the country.
e The essential end of a legitimate dictatorship nowa-
days must be the Counter-Revolution. This does not mean
a dictatorship is normally necessary for the defeat of the
Revolution. But, in certain circumstances, it may be.
In contrast, a revolutionary dictatorship aims to per-
petuate itself. It violates authentic rights and penetrates
all spheres of society to destroy them. It carries out this
destruction by sundering family life, harming the genuine
elites, subverting the social hierarchy, fomenting utopian
ideas and disorderly ambitions in the multitudes, extin-
guishing the real life of the social groups, and subjecting
everything to the State. In short, it favors the work of the
Revolution. A typical example of such a dictatorship was
Hitlerism.
For this reason, a revolutionary dictatorship is funda-
CHAPTER III 23
mentally anti-Catholic. In fact, in a truly Catholic ambi-
ence, there can be no climate for such a situation.
This is not to say that a revolutionary dictatorship in
one or another country has not sought to favor the Church.
But this is merely a question of a political attitude that is
transformed into open or veiled persecution as soon as the
ecclesiastical authority begins to hinder the pace of the
Revolution.
CHAPTER IV
The Metamorphoses of the
Revolutionary Process
As can be seen from the analysis in the preceding
chapter, the revolutionary process is the development by
stages of certain disorderly tendencies of Western and
Christian man and of the errors to which they have given
rise.
In each stage, these tendencies and errors have a par-
ticular characteristic. The Revolution, therefore, metamor-
phoses in the course of history.
The metamorphoses observed in the great general lines
of the Revolution recur on a smaller scale within each of
its great episodes.
Hence, the spirit of the French Revolution, in its first
phase, used an aristocratic and even ecclesiastical mask
and language. It frequented the court and sat at the table
of the royal council. Later, it became bourgeois and
worked for a bloodless abolition of the monarchy and
nobility and for a veiled and pacific suppression of the
Catholic Church. As soon as it could, it became Jacobin
and inebriated itself with blood in the Terror.
CHAPTER IV 25
But the excesses committed by the Jacobin faction
stirred up reactions. The Revolution tured back, going
through the same stages in reverse. From Jacobin it
became bourgeois in the Directory. With Napoleon, it
extended its hand to the Church and opened its doors to the
exiled nobility. Finally, it cheered the returning Bourbons.
Although the French Revolution ended, the revolutionary
process did not end. It erupted again with the fall of
Charles X and the rise of Louis Philippe, and thus through
successive metamorpheses, taking advantage of its suc-
cesses and even its failures, it reached its present state of
paroxysm.
The Revolution, then, uses its metamorphoses not only
to advance but also to carry out the tactical retreats that
have so frequently been necessary.
This movement, always alive, has at times feigned
death. This is one of its most interesting metamorphoses.
On the surface, the situation of a certain country looks
entirely tranquil. The counter-revolutionary reaction
slackens and dozes. But in the depths of the religious,
cultural, social, or economic life, the revolutionary fer-
ment is continuously spreading. Then, at the end of this
apparent interval, there is an unexpectcd upheaval, often
more severe than the previous ones.
CHAPTER V
The Three Depths of the
Revolution: In the Tendencies, in
the Ideas, and in the Facts
1. THE REVOLUTION IN THE TENDENCIES
As we have seen, this Revolution is a process made up
of stages and has its ultimate origin in certain disorderly
tendencies that serve as its soul and most intimate driving
force. !
Accordingly, we can also distinguish in the Revolution
three depths, which, chronologically speaking, overlap to
a certain extent.
The first and deepest level consists of a crisis in the ten-
dencies. These disorderly tendencies by their very nature
struggle for realization. No longer conforming to a whole
order of things contrary to them, they begin by modifying
mentalities, ways of being, artistic expressions, and cus-
toms without immediately touching directly—at least
habitually—aideas.
1. See Part I, Chapter 3, 5; also Chapter 7, 3.
CHAPTER V 27
2. THE REVOLUTION IN THE IDEAS
The crisis passes from these deep strata to the ideologi-
cal terrain. Indeed, as Paul Bourget makes evident in his
celebrated work Le Démon du Midi, “One must live as one
thinks, under pain of sooner or later ending up thinking
as one has lived.”? Inspired by the disorder of these deep
tendencies, new doctrines burst forth. In the beginning,
they at times seek a modus vivendi with the old doctrines,
expressing themselves in such a way as to maintain a sem-
blance of harmony with them. Generally, however, this
soon breaks out into open warfare.
3. THE REVOLUTION IN THE FACTS
This transformation of the ideas extends, in turn, to the
terrain of facts. Here, by bloody or unbloody means, the
institutions, laws, and customs are transformed both in the
religious realm and in temporal society. It is a third crisis,
now fully within the field of facts.
4. OBSERVATIONS
A. The Depths of the Revolution Are Not
Identical to Chronological Stages
These depths, in a way, are echeloned. But an attentive
analysis shows that the operations of the Revolution with-
in them are so intermingled in time that these different
depths cannot be viewed as a number of distinct chrono-
logical unities.
2. Paul Bourget, Le Démon du Midi (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1914), vol. 2,
p. 375.
28 ; PART I, THE REVOLUTION
B. The Differentiation of the Three
Depths of the Revolution
These three depths are not always clearly differentiated
from one another. The degree of distinctness varies con-
siderably from one concrete case to another.
C. The Revolutionary Process Is Not Irrepressible
The movement of a people through these various
depths is controllable. Taking the first step does not neces-
sarily imply reaching the last and thercby sliding into the
next depth. On the contrary, man’s free will, aided by
grace, can overcome any crisis, just as it can stop and
overcome the Revolution itself.
In describing these aspects of the Revolution, we act
like a physician who depicts the complete evolution of an
illness right up to death, without meaning by this that the
illness is incurable.
CHAPTER VI
The March of the Revolution
The previous considerations gave us some data about
the march of the Revolution, namely, its processive char-
acter, its metamorphoses, its outbreak in the innermost
recesses of the human soul, and its externalization in acts.
As can be seen, the Revolution has a whole dynamic of
its own. We can attain a greater appreciation of this by
studying additional aspects of the Revolution’s march.
1. THE DRIVING FORCE OF THE REVOLUTION
A. The Revolution and the Disordered Tendencies
The most powerful driving force of the Revolution is in
the disordered tendencies.
For this reason, the Revolution has been compared to a
typhoon, an earthquake, a cyclone, the unlcashed forces of
nature being material images of the unbridled passions of
man.
30 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
B. The Paroxysms of the Revolution Are Fully
Present in Its Seeds
Like cataclysms, evil passions have an immense
power—but only to destroy.
In the first instant of its great explosions, this power
already has the potential for all the virulence it will
manifest in its worst excesses. In the first denials of
Protestantism, for example, the anarchic yearnings of
communism were already implicit. While Luther was,
from the viewpoint of his explicit formulations, no more
than Luther, all the tendencies, state of soul, and impon-
derables of the Lutheran explosion already bore within
them, authentically and fully, even though implicitly, the
spirit of Voltaire and Robespierre and of Marx and Lenin.'
C. The Revolution Aggravates Its Own Causes
These disordered tendencies develop like itches and
vices; the more they are satisfied, the more intense they
become. The tendencies produce moral crises, erroneous
doctrines, and then revolutions. Each of them, in turn,
exacerbates the tendencies. The latter then lead, by an
analogous movement, to new crises, new errors, and new
revolutions. This explains why we find ourselves today in
such a paroxysm of impiety and immorality and such an
abyss of disorder and discord.
2. THE APPARENT INTERVALS OF THE REVOLUTION
The existence of periods of accentuated calm might
give the impression that at such times the Revolution has
1. Cf. Leo XIII, encyclical Quod Apostolicit muneris, December 28, 1878,
in Fr. Joseph Husslein, S.J., Social Wellsprings: Fourteen Epochal Docu-
ments by Pope Leo XII (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1940), p. 15.
CHAPTER VI 31
ceased. It would thus sccm that the revolutionary process
is not continuous and therefore not one.
However, these calms are merely metamorphoses of
the Revolution. The periods of apparent tranquility—the
supposed intervals—have usually been times of silent and
profound revolutionary ferment. Consider, for example,
the period of the Restoration (1815-1830).’
3. THE MARCH FROM REFINEMENT TO REFINEMENT
From what we have seen,’ each stage of the Revolution,
compared with the preceding one, is but a refinement.
Naturalistic humanism and Protestantism were refined in
the French Revolution, which in its turn was refined in the
great revolutionary process of the Bolshevization of the
contemporary world.
The fact is that disordered passions, moving in a
crescendo analogous to the acceleration of gravity and
feeding upon their own works, lead to consequences
which, in their turn, develop according to a proportional
intensity. In like progression, errors beget errors, and revo-
lutions prepare the way for revolutions.
4. THE HARMONIC SPEEDS OF THE REVOLUTION
This revolutionary process takes place at two different
speeds. One is fast and generally destined to fail in the
short term. The other is much slower and has usually
proven successful.
A. The Rapid March
The precommunist movements of the Anabaptists, for
2. See Part I, Chapter 4.
3. See 1, C, above.
32 PART 1, THE REVOLUTION
example, immediately drew in various fields all or nearly
all the consequences of the spirit and tendencies of the
Pseudo-Reformation. They were a failure.
B. The Slow March
Slowly, during the course of more than four centuries,
the more moderate currents of Protestantism, moving from
refinement to refinement through successive stages of
dynamism and inertia, have been gradually favoring, in
one way or another, the march of the West toward the same
extreme point.’
C. How These Speeds Harmonize
The role of each of these speeds in the march of the
Revolution should be studied. It might be said that the
more rapid movements are useless, but that is not the case.
The explosion of these extremisms raises a standard and
creates a fixed target whose very radicalism fascinates the
moderates, who slowly advance toward it. Thus, socialism
shuns communism, which it silently admires and tends
toward.
Even earlier, the same could be said of the communist
Babeuf and his henchmen during the last flare-ups of the
French Revolution. They were crushed. Yet, little by little,
society treads the path along which they wished to lead it.
The failure of the extremists is, then, merely apparent.
They collaborate indirectly, but powerfully, in the advance
of the Revolution, gradually attracting the countless mul-
titude of the “prudent,” the “moderate,” and the mediocre
toward the realization of their culpable and exacerbated
chimeras.
4. See Part II, Chapter 8, 2.
CHAPTER VI : 33
5. OBJECTIONS REFUTED
Having considered these notions, we can now refute
some objections that could not have been analyzed ade-
quately before this point.
A. Slow-speed Revolutionaries and
“Semi-counterrevolutionaries”
What distinguishes the revolutionary who has followed
the rhythm of the fast march from the person who is
gradually becoming a revolutionary according to the
rhythm of the slow march? When the revolutionary pro-
cess began in the former, it found little or no resistance.
Virtue and truth lived a superficial life in his soul. They
were as dry wood that any spark could set afire. On the
contrary, when this process takes place slowly, it is
because the spark of the Revolution encountered, at
least in part, green wood. In other words, it has con-
fronted considerable truth or virtue that remains hostile
to the action of the revolutionary spirit. A soul in this
situation is divided and lives between two opposing
principles, that of the Revolution and that of order.
The coexistence of these two principles may give
rise to very diverse situations.
a. The slow-speed revolutionary allows himself to be
carried along by the Revolution, which he opposes only
with the resistance of inertia.
b. The slow-speed revolutionary who has counter-revo-
lutionary “clots” also allows himself to be carried along
by the Revolution, but on some concrete point he rejects it.
Thus, for example, he will be a socialist in every respect
except that he retains a liking for aristocratic manners.
Depending on the case, he may even go so far as to attack
socialist vulgarity. This is undoubtedly a resistance. But it
34 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
is a resistance on a question of detail, made up of habits
and impressions. It does not return to principles. For this
very reason it is a resistance without any great importance,
one that will die with the individual. If it should occur in a
social group, sooner or later, by violence or persuasion, the
Revolution inexorably will dismantle it in one or several
generations.
c. The “semi-counterrevolutionary”® differs from the
preceding only in that the process of “coagulation” was
more forceful in him and reverted to basic principles—
only some principles, of course, and not all of them. In
him, the reaction against the Revolution is more pertina-
cious, more lively. It is an obstacle that is not merely iner-
tia. His conversion to an entirely counter-revolutionary
position is easier, at least in thesis. Any excess of the
Revolution might cause in him a complete transformation,
a crystallization of his good tendencies into an attitude of
unshakable firmness. However, until this felicitous trans-
formation takes place, the “semi-counterrevolutionary”
cannot be considered a soldier of the Counter-Revolution.
The ease with which both the slow-speed revolutionary
and the “semi-counterrevolutionary” accept the conquests
of the Revolution is typical of their conformity.
While affirming, for example, the thesis of the union of
Church and State, they live with indifference in a regime
of their separation, without any serious effort to make
possible an eventual restoration of the union of the two
under suitable conditions.
B. Protestant Monarchies and Catholic Republics
An objection could be made to our theses: If the uni-
versal republican movement is a fruit of the Protestant
5. See Part I, Chapter 9.
CHAPTER VI 35
spirit, then why is there only one Catholic king in the
world today*® while so many Protestant countries continue
to be monarchies?
The explanation is simple. England, Holland, and the
Nordic nations, for a series of historical, psychological,
and other reasons, have a great affinity with monarchy.
When the Revolution penetrated them, it could not pre-
vent the monarchical sentiment from “coagulating.” Thus,
royalty obstinately continues to survive in those countries,
even though the Revolution is penetrating deeper and
deeper in other fields. “Surviving”... yes, to the extent
that dying slowly cam be called surviving. The English
monarchy, reduced largely to a role of mere display, and
the other Protestant monarchies, transformed for most
intents and purposes into republics whose heads hold
life-long hereditary office, are quietly agonizing. If things
continue as they are, these monarchies will die out in
silence.
Without denying that other causes contribute to this
survival, we wish to stress this very important factor,
which falls within the scope of our exposition.
On the contrary, in the Latin nations the love for an
external and visible discipline and for a strong and presti-
gious public authority is, for many reasons, much smaller.
Consequently, the Revolution did not find in them such
a deep-rooted monarchical sentiment. It easily swept away
their thrones. But heretofore, it has not been sufficiently
strong to overthrow religion.
C. Protestant Austerity
Another objection to our work could arise from the fact
that certain Protestant sects have an austerity verging on
6. The author is referring to the King of the Belgians. Subsequently, in
1975, Prince Juan Carlos was sworn in as King of Spain.— Ed.
36 - PART I, THE REVOLUTION
exaggeration. How, then, can one explain all of Protes-
tantism as an explosion of the desire to enjoy life?
Even here the objection is not difficult to resolve. When
the Revolution penetrated certain environments, it encoun-
tered a very strong love for austerity. A “clot” formed. Al-
though the Revolution was entirely successful in the mat-
ter of pride, it was not so in the matter of sensuality. In
such environments, life is enjoyed by means of the dis-
creet delights of pride and not by the gross pleasures of the
flesh. It may even be that austerity, encouraged by an
intensified pride, reacted in an exaggerated way against
sensuality. But this reaction, however obstinate, is sterile.
Sooner or later, through lack of sustenance or by violence,
it will be destroyed by the Revolution. The breath of life
that will regenerate the earth will not come from a rigid,
cold, and mummified puritanism.
D. The Single Front of the Revolution
Such “clots” and crystallizations normally lead to
clashes between the forces of the Revolution. Considering
them, one might think that the powers of evil are divided
against themselves and that our unitary concept of the
revolutionary process is false.
Such an idea ts an illusion. By a profound instinct that
reveals they are harmonic in their essential elements and
contradictory only in their accidents, these forces have an
astonishing capacity to unite against the Catholic Church
whenever they face her.
Sterile in the good elements remaining in them, the
revolutionary forces are only truly efficient in evil. Thus,
each of them, from its own side, attacks the Church, which
becomes like a city besieged by an immense army.
It behooves us not to fail to include among these forces
of the Revolution those Catholics who profess the doctrine
CHAPTER VI 7 37
of the Church but are dominated by the revolutionary spir-
it. A thousand times more dangerous than her declared
enemies, they combat the Holy City from within her walls.
They well merit what Pius [X said of them:
Though the children of this world be wiser than the
children of light, their snares and their violence would
undoubtedly have less success if a great number of
those who call themselves Catholics did not extend a
friendly hand to them. Yes, unfortunately, there are
those who seem to want to walk in agreement with our
enemies and try to build an alliance between light and
darkness, an accord between justice and iniquity, by
means of those so-called liberal Catholic doctrines,
which, based on the most pernicious principles, adulate
the civil power when it invades things spiritual and urge
souls to respect or at least tolerate the most iniquitous
laws, as if it had not been written absolutely that no one
can serve two masters. They are certainly much more
dangerous and more baneful than our declared enemies,
not only because they second their efforts, perhaps
without realizing it, but also because, by maintaining
themselves at the very edge of condemned opinions,
they take on an appearance of integrity and irreprehen-
sible doctrine, beguiling the imprudent friends of con-
ciliations and deceiving honest persons, who would
revolt against a declared error. In this way, they divide
the minds, rend the unity, and weaken the forces that
should be assembled against the enemy.’
6. THE AGENTS OF THE REVOLUTION: FREEMASONRY
AND OTHER SECRET FORCES
Since we are studying the driving forces of the Revo-
lution, we must say a word about its agents.
7. Pius IX, letter to the president and members of the Saint Ambrose
Circle of Milan, March 6, 1873, in J Papi e La Gioventy (Rome: Editrice
A.V.E., 1944), p. 36.
38 ; PART I, THE REVOLUTION
We do not believe that the mere dynamism of the pas-
sions and errors of men could coordinate such diverse
means to achieve a single end, namely, the victory of the
Revolution.
The production of a process as consistent and continu-
ous as that of the Revolution amid the thousand vicissi-
tudes of centurics fraught with surprises of every kind
seems impossible to us without the action of successive
generations of extraordinarily intelligent and powerful
conspirators. To think that the Revolution could have
reached its present state in the absence of such conspira-
tors is like believing that hundreds of letters thrown out a
window could arrange themselves on the ground to
spell out a literary piece, Carducci’s “Ode to Satan,” for
instance.
Heretofore, the driving forces of the Revolution have
been manipulated by most sagacious agents, who have
used them as means for carrying out the revolutionary
process.
Gencrally speaking, one can classify as agents of the
Revolution all the sects—whatever their nature—engen-
dered by it, from its origin to our days, to disseminate its
thought or to concatenate its plots. The master sect, how-
ever, around which all the others are organized as mere
auxiliaries—sometimes consciously and other times not--
is Freemasonry, as clearly follows from the pontifical doc-
uments, especially Leo XIII’s encyclical Humanum genus,
of April 20, 1884.
The success of these conspirators, and particularly
Freemasonry, is due not only to their indisputable capaci-
ty to organize and conspire, but also to their clear under-
standing of the Revolution’s profound essence and of the
use of natural laws—the laws of politics, sociology, psy-
chology, art, economics, and so forth—to advance the
attaining of their goals.
CHAPTER VI 39
In this way, the agents of chaos and subversion are like
a scientist who, instead of merely relying on his own
strength, studics and activates natural forces a thousand
times more powerful than he.
Besides largely explaining the success of the Revolu-
tion, this provides an important indication for the soldiers
of the Counter-Revolution.
CHAPTER VII
The Essence of the Revolution
Having rapidly described the crisis of the Christian
West, we will now analyze it.
1. THE REVOLUTION PAR EXCELLENCE
As already stated, this critical process we have been
considering is a revolution.
A. Meaning of the Word Revolution
By Revolution we mean a movement that aims to
destroy a legitimate power or order and replace it with an
illegitimate power or state of things. (We have purposely
not said “order of things.”)
B. Bloody and Unbloody Revolution
In this sense, strictly speaking, a revolution may be
bloodless. The one we are considering developed and
continues to develop by all kinds of means. Some of these
are bloody, others are not. For instance, this century’s two
CHAPTER VII 4)
world wars, from the standpoint of their deepest conse-
quences, are chapters of it, and among the bloodiest. On
the other hand, the increasingly socialist legislation in all
or almost all countries today is a most important and
bloodless progress of the Revolution.
C. The Amplitude of the Revolution
Although the Revolution has often overthrown legiti-
mate authorities and replaced them with rulers lacking
any title of legitimacy, it would be a mistake to think this
is all there is to the Revolution. Its chief objective is not
the destruction of certain rights of persons or families. It
desires far more than that. It wants to destroy a whole
legitimate order of things and replace it with an illegiti-
mate situation. And “order of things” does not say it all.
It is a vision of the universe and a way of being of man
that the Revolution seeks to abolish with the intention of
replacing them with radically contrary counterparts.
D. The Revolution Par Excellence
In this sense, one understands that this is not just a
revolution; it is tre Revolution.
E. The Destruction of the Order Par Excellence
Indeed, the order of things being destroyed is medieval
Christendom. Now, medieval Christendom was not just
any order, or merely one of many possible orders. It was
the realization, in the circumstances inherent to the times
and places, of the only authentic order among men,
namely, Christian civilization.
In his encyclical Immortale Dei, Leo XIII described
medieval Christendom in these terms:
42 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
There was a time when the philosophy of the Gospel
governed the states. In that epoch, the influence of
Christian wisdom and its divine virtue permeated the
laws, institutions, and customs of the peoples, all
categories and all relations of civil society. Then the
religion instituted by Jesus Christ, solidly established in
the degree of dignity due to it, flourished everywhere
thanks to the favor of princes and the legitimate
protection of magistrates. Then the Priesthood and the
Empire were united in a happy concord and by the
friendly interchange of good offices. So organized, civil
society gave fruits superior to all expectations, whose
memory subsists and will subsist, registered as it is
in innumerable documents that no artifice of the
adversaries can destroy or obscure.'
Having begun in the fifteenth century, the destruction
of the disposition of men and things according to the
doctrine of the Church, the teacher of Revelation and
Natural Law, is almost complete today. This disposition of
men and things is order par excellence. What is being
implanted is the exact opposite of this. Therefore, it is the
Revolution par excellence.
Indubitably, the present Revolution had precursors and
prefigures. For example, Arius and Mohammed were
prefigures of Luther. Also, in different epochs, utopians
dreamed of days very much like those of the Revolution.
Finally, on several occasions, peoples or groups tried to
establish a state of things analogous to the chimeras of the
Revolution.
But all these dreams and prefigures are little or nothing
in comparison to the Revolution in whose process we live.
By its radicality, by its universality, by its potency, the
Revolution has penetrated so deep and is reaching so far
1. Leo XII, encyclical fmmortale Dei, November 1, 1885, Bonne Presse,
Paris, vol. 2, p. 39.
CHAPTER VII : 43
that it stands unmatched in history. Many thoughtful souls
are wondering if we have not in fact reached the times of
the Anti-Christ. Indeed, to judge from the words of Pope
John XXIIL, it would seem they are not distant.
We tell you furthermore that in this terrible hour,
when the spirit of evil seeks every means to destroy the
kingdom of God, we must exert ourselves to the utmost
to defend it, if you do not wish to see your city lying in
immensely greater ruins than those left by the
earthquake of fifty years ago. How much more difficult
it would be then to Taise up the souls, once they had
been separated from the Church or enslaved to the false
ideologies of our times!’
2. REVOLUTION AND LEGITIMACY
A. Legitimacy Par Excellence
In general, the concept of legitimacy is focused on only
in the context of dynasties and governments. Though
heeding the teachings of Leo XIII in the encyclical Au
milieu des sollicitudes, one cannot ignore the question of
dynastic or governmental legitimacy, for it is an extreme-
ly grave moral matter that upright consciences must con-
sider with all attention.
However, the concept of legitimacy applies to other
problems as well.
There is a higher legitimacy, characteristic of every
order of things in which the Royalty of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, the model and source of legitimacy for all royalties
and earthly powers, is effectuated. To fight for legitimate
2. John XXIII, radio message of December 28, 1958, to the population
of Messina, on the fifticth anniversary of the earthquake which
destroyed that city, L’Osservatore Romano (weekly French edition),
January 23, 1959.
44 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
rulers is an obligation, indeed a grave one. Yet it is neces-
sary to see the legitimacy of those in authority not only as
a good, excellent per se, but also as a means to an cven
higher good, namely, the legitimacy of the entire social
order, of all human institutions and ambiences, which is
achieved through the disposition of all things according to
the doctrine of the Church.
B. Catholic Culture and Civilization
Therefore, the ideal of the Counter-Revolution is to
restore and promote Catholic culture and civilization.
This theme would not be sufficiently enunciated if it did
not contain a definition of what we understand by Catho-
lic culture and Catholic civilization. We realize that the
terms civilization and culture are used in many different
senses. Obviously, it is not our intention here to take a
position on a question of terminology. We limit ourselves
to using these words as relatively precise labels to indi-
cate certain realities. We are more concerned with pro-
viding a sound idea of these realities than with debating
terminology.
A soul in the state of grace possesses all virtues to a
greater or lesser degree. Illuminated by faith, it has the
elements to form the only true vision of the universe.
The fundamental element of Catholic culture is the
vision of the universe elaborated according to the doctrine
of the Church. This culture includes not only the learning,
that is, the possession of the information needed for such
an elaboration, but also the analysis and coordination of
this information according to Catholic doctrine. This cul-
ture is not restricted to the theological, philosophical, or
scientific field, but encompasses the breadth of human
knowledge; it is reflected in the arts and implies the
affirmation of values that permeate all aspects of life.
Catholic civilization is the structuring of all human
CHAPTER VII 45
relations, of all human institutions, and of the State itself
according to the doctrine of the Church.
C. The Sacral Character of Catholic Civilization
It is implicit that such an order of things is fundamen-
tally sacral, and entails the recognition of all the powers
of the Holy Church, particularly those of the Supreme
Pontiff: a direct power over spiritual things, and an indi-
rect power over temporal things whenever they have to do
with the salvation of souls.
Indeed, the purpose of society and of the State is virtuous
life in common. Now, the virtues man is called to practice
are the Christian virtues, and the first of these is the love
of God. Society and the State have, then, a sacral purpose.’
Undoubtedly, it is the Church that possesses the proper
means to promote the salvation of souls, but society and
the State have instrumental means for the same end, that
is, means which, set in motion by a higher agent, produce
an effect superior to themselves.
D. Culture and Civilization Par Excellence
From the foregoing it is easy to infer that Catholic
culture and civilization are the culture and civilization par
excellence. It must be noted that they cannot exist save in
Catholic peoples. Indeed, even though man may know the
principles of Natural Law by his own reason, a people
without the Magisterium of the Church cannot durably
preserve the knowledge of all of them.‘ For this reason, a
people that does not profess the true religion cannot
durably practice all the Commandments.’ Given these
3. Cf. Saint Thomas Aquinas, De Regime Principum, 1, 14-15.
4. Cf. First Vatican Council, sess. ITI, chapter 2 (Denzinger 1786).
5. Cf. Council of Trent, sess. VI, chapter 2 (Denzinger 812).
46 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
conditions, and since there can be no Christian order
without the knowledge and observance of the Law of
God, civilization and culture par excellence are only
possible within the fold of the Holy Church. Indeed, as
Saint Pius X stated, civilization
is all the more true, all the more lasting, all the more
fecund in precious fruits, the more purely Christian it is;
it is all the more decadent, to the great misfortune of
society, the farther it withdraws from the Christian
ideal. Thus, by the intrinsic nature of things, the Church
becomes also in fact the guardian and protector of
Christian civilization.*
E. Illegitimacy Par Excellence
If this is what order and legitimacy are, one easily sces
what the Revolution is, for it is the opposite of that order.
It is disorder and illegitimacy par excellence.
3. PRIDE AND SENSUALITY AND THE METAPHYSICAL
VALUES OF THE REVOLUTION
Two notions conceived as metaphysical values express
well the spirit of the Revolution: absolute equality, com-
plete liberty. And there are two passions that most serve it:
pride and sensuality.
In referring to passions, we must explain in what sense
we use the word in this work. For the sake of brevity, ad-
hering to the usage of various authors on spiritual matters,
whenever we speak of the passions as promoters of the
Revolution, we are referring to disordered passions. And,
in keeping with everyday language, we include among the
disordered passions all impulses toward sin existing in
6. Saint Pius X, encyclical J] fermo proposito, June 11, 1905, Bonne
Presse, Paris, vol. 2, p. 92.
CHAPTER VII 47
man as a consequence of the triple concupiscence, name-
ly, that of the flesh, the eyes, and the pride of life.’
A. Pride and Egalitarianism
The proud person, subject to another’s authority, hates
first of all the particular yoke that weighs upon him.
In a second stage, the proud man hates all authority in
general and all yokes, and, even more, the very principle
of authority considered in the abstract.
Because he hates all authority, he also hates superiority
of any kind. And in all this there is a true hatred for God’
This hatred for any inequality has gone so far as to
drive high-ranking persons to risk and even lose their posi-
tions just to avoid accepting the superiority of somebody
else.
There is more. In a height of virulence, pride could lead
a person to fight for anarchy and to refuse the supreme
power were it offered to him. This is because the simple
existence of that power implicitly attests to the principle
of authority, to which every man as such—the proud
included—can be subject.
Pride, then, can lead to the most radical and complete
egalitarianism.
This radical and metaphysical egalitarianism has
various aspects.
a. Equality between men and God. Pantheism, imma-
nentism, and all esoteric forms of religion aim to place
God and men on an equal footing and to invest the latter
with divine properties. An atheist is an egalitarian who,
to avoid the absurdity of affirming that man is God,
commits the absurdity of declaring that God does not
exist. Secularism is a form of atheism and, therefore, of
7. Cf. 1 John 2:16.
8. See item m, below.
48 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
egalitarianism. It affirms that it is impossible to be certain
of the existence of God and, consequently, that man should
act in the temporal realm as if God did not exist; in other
words, he should act like a person who has dethroned God.
b. Equality in the ecclesiastical realm: the suppression
of a priesthood endowed with the power of Orders, magis-
terium, and government, or at least of a priesthood with
hierarchical degrees.
c. Equality among the different religions. All religious
discrimination is to be disdained because it violates the
fundamental equality of men. Therefore, the different
religions must receive a rigorously equal treatment. To
claim that only one religion is true to the exclusion of the
others amounts to affirming superiority, contradicting
evangelical meekness, and acting impolitically, since it
closes the hearts of men against it.
d. Equality in the political realm: the elimination or at
least the lessening of the inequality between the rulers and
the ruled. Power comes not from God but from the
masses; they command and the government must obcy.
Monarchy and aristocracy are to be proscribed as intrin-
sically evil regimes because they are antiegalitarian. Only
democracy is legitimate, just, and evangelical.’
e. Equality in the structure of society: the suppression
of classes, especially those perpetuated by heredity, and
the extirpation of all aristocratic influence upon the direc-
tion of society and upon the general tone of culture and
customs. The natural hierarchy constituted by the supe-
riority of intellectual over manual work will disappear
through the overcoming of the distinction between them.
J. The abolition of the intermediate bodies between the
individual and the State, as well as of the privileges in-
9. Cf Saint Pius X, apostolic letter Notre charge apostolique, August
25, 1910, American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol. 35 (October 1910),
p. 700.
CHAPTER VII 49
herent in every social body. No matter how much the Re-
volution hates the absolutism of kings, it hates interme-
diate bodies and the medieval organic monarchies even
more. This is because monarchic absolutism tends to put
all subjects, even those of the highest standing, at a level
of reciprocal equality in a lower station that foreshadows
the annihilation of the individual and the anonymity that
have reached their apex in the great urban concentrations
of socialist societies. Among the intermediate groups to be
abolished, the family ranks first. Until it manages to wipe
it out, the Revolution tries to lower it, mutilate it, and vil-
ify it in every way.
g. Economic equality. No one owns anything; every-
thing belongs to the collectivity. Private property is abol-
ished along with each person’s right to the full fruits of his
toil and to the choice of his profession.
h. Equality in the exterior aspects of existence. Variety
easily leads to inequality of status. Therefore, variety in
dress, housing, furniture, habits, and so on, is reduced as
much as possible.
i. Equality of souls. Propaganda standardizes, so to
speak, all souls, taking away their peculiarities and almost
their own life. Even the psychological and attitudinal
differences between the sexes tend to diminish as much as
possible. Because of this, the people, essentially a great
family of different but harmonious souls united by what
is common to them, disappears. And the masses, with their
great empty, collective, and enslaved soul, arise."
j. Equality in all social relations: between grown-ups
and youngsters, employers and employees, teachers and
students, husband and wife, parents and children, etc.
k. Equality in the international order. The State is con-
10. Cf. Pius XII, Christmas broadcast, 1944, in Vincent A. Yzermans,
Major Addresses of Pope Pius XH (St. Paul: North Central Publishing
Co., 1961), vol. 2, pp. 81-82.
50 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
stituted by an independent people exercising full domin-
ion over a territory. Sovereignty is, therefore, in public law,
the image of property. Once we admit the idea of a people,
whose characteristics distinguish it from other peoples,
and the idea of sovereignty, we are perforce in the pres-
ence of inequalities: of capacity, virtue, number, and oth-
ers. Once the idea of territory is admitted, we have quanti-
tative and qualitative inequality among the various territo-
rial spaces. This is why the Revolution, which is funda-
mentally egalitarian, dreams of merging all races, all peo-
ples, and all states into a single race, people, and state.”
L. Equality among the different parts of the country. For
the same reasons, and by analogous means, the Revolu-
tion tends to do away with any wholesome regionalism—
whether political, cultural, or other—within countries
today.
m. Egalitarianism and hatred for God. Saint Thomas
Aquinas teaches” that the diversity of creatures and their
hicrarchical gradation are good in themselves, for thus the
perfections of the Creator shine more resplendently
throughout creation. He says further that Providence insti-
tuted inequality among the angels” as well as among men,
both in the terrestrial Paradise and in this land of exile."
For this reason, a universe of equal creatures would be a
world in which the resemblance between creatures and the
Creator would have been eliminated as much as possible.
To hate in principle all inequality is, then, to place oneself
metaphysically against the best elements of resemblance
between the Creator and creation. It is to hate God.
n. The limits of inequality. Of course, one cannot con-
clude from this doctrinal explanation that inequality is
always and necessarily a good.
11. See Part I, Chapter 11, 3.
12. Cf. Summa Contra Gentiles, ll, 45; Summa TI heologica, 1, q. 47, a. 2.
13. Cf. Summa Theologica, 1, q. 50, a. 4.
14. Ibid., q. 96, aa. 3, 4.
CHAPTER VII 51
All men are equal by nature and different only in their
accidents. The rights they derive from the mere fact of
being human are equal for all: the right to life, honor,
sufficient living conditions (and therefore the right to
work), property, the setting up of a family, and, above all,
the knowledge and practice of the true religion. The
inequalities that threaten these rights are contrary to the
order of Providence. However, within these limits, the
inequalities that arise from accidents such as virtue, talent,
beauty, strength, family, tradition, and so forth, are just
and according to the order of the universe.’
B. Sensuality and Liberalism
Along with the pride that breeds all egalitarianism,
sensuality in the broader sense of the term is the cause of
liberalism. It is in these sad depths that one finds the
junction between these two metaphysical principles of the
Revolution, namely, equality and liberty, which are mu-
tually contradictory from so many points of view.
a. The hierarchy in the soul, God, Who imprinted a
hierarchical mark on all visible and invisible creation, did
the same on the human soul. The intelligence should guide
the will, and the latter should govern the sensibility. As a
consequence of Original Sin, a constant friction exists
within man between the sensible appetites and the will
guided by the reason: “I see another law in my members,
which fights against the law of my mind.”
But the will, even though a sovereign reduced to gov-
erning subjects ever attempting to rebel, has the means to
always prevail... provided it does not resist the grace of
God.”
15. Cf. Pius XII, Christmas broadcast, 1944, op. cit., pp. 81-82.
16. Rom. 7:23.
17. Cf. Rom. 7:25.
52 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
b. Egalitarianism in the soul. The revolutionary process
aims to achieve a general leveling, but frequently it has
been no more than a usurpation of the ruling function by
those who ought to obey. Once this process is transposed
to the relations among the powers of the soul, it leads to
the lamentable tyranny of the unrestrained passions over a
weak and ruined will and a darkened intelligence, and
especially to the dominion of a raging sensuality over the
sentiments of modesty and shame.
When the Revolution proclaims absolute liberty as a
metaphysical principle, it does so only to justify the free
course of the worst passions and the most pernicious
errors.
c. Egalitarianism and liberalism. This inversion—the
right to think, fecl, and do everything the unrestrained
passions demand—is the essence of liberalism. This is
clearly shown in the more exacerbated forms of the liberal
doctrine. On analyzing them, one perceives that liberal-
ism is not interested in freedom for what is good. It is
solely interested in freedom for evil. When in power, it
easily, and even joyfully, restricts the freedom of the good
as much as possible. But in many ways, it protects, favors,
and promotes freedom for evil. In this it shows itself to
be opposed to Catholic civilization, which gives its full
support and total freedom to what is good and restrains
evil as much as possible.
Now, this freedom for evil is precisely freedom for man
as long as he is “revolutionary” in his interior, that is, as
long as he consents to the tyranny of the passions over his
intelligence and will.
Thus liberalism and egalitarianism are fruits of the
same tree.
Incidentally, pride, in breeding hatred against any kind
of authority, induces a clearly liberal attitude. And, in this
18. See item A, above.
CHAPTER VII _ 53
regard, it must be considered an active factor of liberalism.
However, when the Revolution realized that liberty would
result in inequality if men, being unequal in their aptitudes
and their use of them, were left free, out of hatred for
inequality it decided to sacrifice liberty. This gave rise to
its socialist phase, which is but a stage in the process. The
Revolution’s ultimate aim is to establish a state of things
wherein complete liberty and complete equality would
coexist.
Thus, historically, the socialist movement is a mere
refinement of the liberal movement. What leads an authen-
tic liberal to accept socialism is precisely that under it a
thousand good or at least innocent things are tyrannically
forbidden, while the methodical satisfaction (sometimes
with a show of austerity) of the worst and most violent
passions, such as envy, laziness, and lust, is favored. On
the other hand, the liberal perceives that the broadening of
authority in the socialist regime is no more than a means
within the logic of the system for attaining the so intensely
desired goal of final anarchy.
The clashes between certain naive or backward liberals
and the socialists are, therefore, mere superficial incidents
in the revolutionary process. They are harmless misunder-
standings that disturb neither the profound logic of the
Revolution nor its inexorable march in a direction that,
when one sces things clearly, is simultaneously socialist
and liberal.
d. The rock-and-roll generation. The revolutionary
process in souls, as herein described, produced in the most
recent generations, and especially in adolescents of our
days who hypnotize themselves with rock and roll, a frame
of mind characterized by the spontaneity of the primary
reactions, without the control of the intelligence or the
effective participation of the will, and by the predomi-
nance of fantasy and feelings over the methodical analysis
of reality. All this is fruit, in large measure, of a pedagogy
54 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
that virtually eliminates the role of logic and the true for-
mation of the will.
e. Egalitarianism, liberalism, and anarchism. In ac-
cordance with the preceding items, the effervescence of
the disordered passions arouses, on the one hand, hatred
for any restraint and any law, and, on the other, hatred for
any inequality. This effervescence thus leads to the uto-
pian conception of Marxist anarchism, in which an
evolved humanity, living in a society without classes or
government, could enjoy perfect order and the most com-
plete liberty, from which no inequality would arise. As can
be seen, this ideal is simultaneously the most liberal and
the most egalitarian imaginable.
Indeed, the anarchic utopia of Marxism is a state of
things in which the human personality, having reached a
high degree of progress, would be able to develop freely in
a society with neither state nor government.
In this society—which would live in complete order
despite not having a government—economic production
would be organized and highly developed, and the distinc-
tion between intellectual and manual labor would be a
thing of the past. A selective process, not yet determined,
would place the direction of the economy in the hands of
the most capable, without resulting in the formation of
classes.
These would be the only and insignificant remnants of
inequality. But, since this anarchic communist society is
not the final term of history, it seems legitimate to sup-
pose that these remnants would be abolished in a later
evolution.
CHAPTER VIII
The Intelligence, the Will,
and the Sensibility in the
Determination of Human Acts
The previous considerations call for an explication on
the role of the intelligence, the will, and the sensibility in
the relations between error and passion.
It could seem that we are affirming that every error is
conceived by the intelligence to justify some disorderly
passion. Thus, a moralist who affirms a liberal maxim
would always be moved by a liberal tendency.
That is not what we think. The moralist may arrive at a
liberal conclusion solely through weakness of the intelli-
gence affected by Original Sin. In such a case would there
necessarily be some moral fault of another nature, care-
lessness, for instance? This is a question beyond the scope
of our study.
What we do affirm is that, historically, this Revolution
had its ultimate origin in an extremely violent ferment of
the passions. And we are far from denying the great role of
doctrinal errors in this process.
Authors of great worth—de Maistre, de Bonald, Donoso
Cortes, and so many others—have written numerous
56 : PART I, THE REVOLUTION
studics on these errors and the way each was derived from
the other, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, and so
on till the twentieth century. Therefore, it is not our inten-
tion to insist on this matter here.
It does seem to us, however, particularly opportune to
focus on the importance of the passional factors and their
influence in strictly ideological aspects of the revolution-
ary process in which we find ourselves. For, as we see it,
little heed is paid to this point. On account of this, people
do not see the Revolution in its entirety and consequently
adopt inadequate counter-revolutionary methods.
We will now add something about the way in which
passions can influence ideas.
1, FALLEN NATURE, GRACE, AND FREE WILL
By the mere powers of his nature, man can know many
truths and practice various virtues. However, without the
aid of grace, it is impossible for him to perdure in the
knowledge and practice of all the Commandments.’
This means that in every fallen man there is always a
weakness of the intelligence and a first tendency, prior to
any reasoning, that incites him to rebel against the Law.?
2. THE GERM OF THE REVOLUTION
This fundamental tendency to rebel can, at a certain
moment, receive the consent of the free will. Fallen man
sins thus, violating one or more of the Commandments.
But his rebellion can go further and reach the point of a
1. See Part I, Chapter 7, 2, D.
2. Donoso Cortes’s important development on this truth is very pertinent
to the present work. See his “Ensayo sobre el Catolicismo, el Liberalismo
y el Socialismo,” in Obras Completas (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores
Cristianos, 1946), vol. 2, p. 377.
CHAPTER VIII 57
more or less unconfessed hatred for the very moral order
as a whole. This hatred, which is essentially revolution-
ary, can generate doctrinal errors and even lead to the con-
scious and explicit profession of principles contrary to
Moral Law and revealed doctrine as such, which consti-
tutes a sin against the Holy Ghost.
When this hatred began to direct the deepest tendencies
of Western history, the Revolution began. Its process
unfolds today, and its doctrinal errors bear the vigorous
imprint of this hatred, which is the most active cause of the
great apostasy of our days. By its nature, this hatred cannot
be reduced simply to-a doctrinal system: It is disorderly
passion exacerbated to an extremely high degree.
Such an affirmation, which applies to this particular
Revolution, does not imply that there is always a disor-
dered passion at the root of every error. Nor does it deny
that frequently it was an error that unleashed in a given
soul, or even in a given social group, the disorder of the
passions. We merely affirm that the revolutionary process,
considered as a whole and also in its principal episodes,
had as its most active and profound germ the unruliness of
the passions.
3. REVOLUTION AND BAD FAITH
One could pose the following objection: If the passions
are so important in the revolutionary process, it would
seem that its victims are always, at least to some degree, in
bad faith. If Protestantism, for instance, is a child of the
Revolution, is every Protestant in bad faith? Does this not
run contrary to the doctrine of the Church, which admits
there may be souls of good faith in other religions?
It is obvious that a person who has complete good faith
and is endowed with a fundamentally counter-revolutionary
spirit may be caught in the webs of revolutionary sophisms
58 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
(be they of a religious, philosophical, political, or any
other nature) through invincible ignorance. In such per-
sons there is no culpability.
Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said of those who
accept the doctrine of the Revolution on one or another
restricted point through an involuntary lapse of the intel-
ligence.
But if someone, moved by the disorderly passions
inherent to the Revolution, shares in its spirit, the answer
must be otherwise.
A revolutionary in these conditions may have become
convinced that the Revolution’s subversive maxims are
excellent. He will not therefore be insincere, but he will be
guilty of the error into which he has fallen.
Also, a revolutionary may have come to profess a
doctrine of which he is not convinced or is only partially
convinced. In this case, he will be partially or totally
insincere.
In this respect, it seems to us almost unnecessary to
stress that when we affirm that the doctrines of Marx were
implicit in the denials of the Pseudo-Reformation and the
French Revolution, we do not mean the adepts of these
two movements were consciously Marxist before the
Marxist doctrine was put into writing and were hypocriti-
cally concealing their opinions.
The orderly arrangement of the powers of the soul and,
therefore, an increase in the lucidity of the intelligence
illuminated by grace and guided by the Magisterium of
the Church are proper to Christian virtue. This is why
every saint is a model of balance and impartiality. The
objectivity of his judgments and the firm orientation of his
will toward good are not even slightly weakened by the
venomous breath of the disorderly passions.
On the contrary, to the degree a man declines in virtue
and surrenders to the yoke of these passions, his objectivi-
CHAPTER VIII : 59
ty diminishes in everything connected to them. This objec-
tivity becomes particularly disturbed in the judgments a
man makes of himself.
In each concrete case, it is a secret of God to what
degree a slow-marching revolutionary of the sixteenth or
of the eighteenth century, his vision beclouded by the
spirit of the Revolution, realized the profound sense and
the ultimate consequences of its doctrine.
In any event, the hypothesis that all were conscious
Marxists is to be utterly excluded.
CHAPTER IX
The “Semi-counterrevolutionary”
Is Also a Son of the Revolution
Everything that has been said herein provides grounds
for a practical observation.
Spirits marked by this interior Revolution might con-
serve a counter-revolutionary attitude in respect to one or
many points due to an interplay of circumstances and co-
incidences, such as being reared in a strongly traditional
and moral milieu.’
Nevertheless, the spirit of the Revolution will still be
enthroned in the mentality of these “semi-counterrevolu-
tionaries.”
In a people where the majority are in such a state of
soul, the Revolution will be irrepressible until they
change.
Thus, as a consequence of the Revolution’s unity, only
the total counter-revolutionary is an authentic counter-
revolutionary.
As for the “semi-counterrevolutionaries” in whose souls
1. See Part I, Chapter 6, 5, A.
CHAPTER IX 6
the idol of Revolution begins to totter, their situation is
somewhat different. We shall discuss it later.’
2. See Part II, Chapter 12, 10.
CHAPTER X
Culture, Arts, and Ambiences
in the Revolution
Having described the complexity and scope of the
revolutionary process in the deepest levels of souls and,
therefore, in the mentality of peoples, we are prepared to
point out the full import of culture, arts, and ambiences in
the march of the Revolution.
J. CULTURE
The revolutionary ideas enable the tendencies from
which they originate to assert themselves with appear-
ances of acceptability in the cyes of their adherents and
others. Used by the revolutionary to shake the true con-
victions of the latter and thus to unleash or exacerbate the
rebellion of their passions, these ideas inspire and shape
the institutions created by the Revolution, and are to be
found in the most varied branches of knowledge or cul-
ture, for it is nearly impossible for any of these branches
not to be involved, at least indirectly, in the struggle
between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution,
CHAPTER X : 63
2. ARTS
Given that God established mysterious and admirable
relations between, on the one hand, certain forms, colors,
sounds, perfumes, and flavors and, on the other, certain
states of soul, it is obvious that, through the arts, mentali-
ties can be profoundly influenced and persons, families,
and peoples can be induced to form a profoundly revolu-
tionary state of spirit. It suffices to recall the analogy
between the spirit of the French Revolution and the fash-
ions created during it, or the analogy between the revolu-
tionary turmoil of today and the present extravagances in
fashion and in the so-called advanced schools of art.
3, AMBIENCES
Ambiences may favor good or bad customs. To the
degree they favor good ones, they can oppose the Revo-
lution with the admirable barriers of the reaction, or at
least the inertia, of everything that is wholesomely cus-
tomary. To the degree they favor bad customs, they can
communicate to souls the tremendous toxins and energies
of the revolutionary spirit.
4. THE HISTORICAL ROLE OF THE ARTS AND
AMBIENCES IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
For this reason, in point of fact, it must be recognized
that the general democratization of customs and life-
styles, carried to the extremes of a systematic and grow-
ing vulgarity, and the proletarianizing action of certain
modern art contributed to the trrumph of egalitarianism
as much as or more than the enacting of certain laws or
the establishing of certain essentially political institutions.
It also must be recognized that if a person managed, for
64 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
example, to put a stop to immoral or agnostic movies or
television programs, he would have done much more for
the Counter-Revolution than if, in the course of the ev-
eryday proceedings of a parliamentary regime, he had
brought about the fall of a leftist cabinet.
CHAPTER XI
The Revolution on Sin and
Redemption, and the
Revolutionary Utopia
Among the multiple aspects of the Revolution, it is
important to emphasize its inducement of its offspring to
underestimate or deny the notions of good and evil, Origi-
nal Sin, and the Redemption.
1. THE REVOLUTION DENIES SIN AND
THE REDEMPTION
As we have seen, the Revolution is a fruit of sin.
However, if it were to acknowledge this, it would unmask
itself and turn against its own cause.
This explains why the Revolution tends not only to
keep silent about its sinful root but also to deny the very
notion of sin. Its radical denial applies to Original and
actual sin and is effected mainly by:
¢ Philosophical or juridical systems that deny the va-
lidity and existence of Moral Law or give this law the vain
and ridiculous foundations of secularism.
¢ The thousand processes of propaganda that create in
66 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
the multitudes a state of soul that ignores morality without
directly denying its existence. All the veneration owed to
virtue is paid to idols such as gold, work, efficiency,
success, security, health, physical beauty, muscular
strength, and sensory delight.
The Revolution is destroying the very notion of sin, the
very distinction between good and evil, in contemporary
man. And, ipso facto, it is denying the Redemption by
Our Lord Jesus Christ, for, if sin does not exist, the Re-
demption becomes incomprehensible and loses any logical
relation with history and life.
2. HISTORICAL EXEMPLIFICATION: THE DENIAL
OF SIN IN LIBERALISM AND SOCIALISM
In each of its stages, the Revolution has sought to
de-emphasize or radically deny the existence of sin.
A. The Immaculate Conception of the Individual
In its liberal and individualistic phase, the Revolution
taught that man is endowed with an infallible reason, a
strong will, and orderly passions. Hence the concept of a
human order in which the individual—-supposedly a per-
fect being—was cverything and the State nothing, or
almost nothing, a necessary evil... provisionally neces-
sary, perhaps. It was the period when it was thought that
ignorance was the only cause of errors and crimes, that
the way to close prisons was to open schools. The im-
maculate conception of the individual was the basic
dogma of these illusions.
The liberal’s great weapon against the potential pre-
dominance of the State and the formation of cliques that
might remove him from the direction of public affairs was
political freedom and universal suffrage.
CHAPTER XI 67
B. The Immaculate Conception of the
Masses and the State
Already in the last century, the inaccuracy of at least
part of this concept had become patent, but the Revolution
did not retreat. Rather than acknowledge its error, it
simply replaced it with another, namely, the immaculate
conception of the masses and the State. According to this
concept, the individual is prone to egoism and can err, but
the masses are always right and never get carried away
by their passions. Their impeccable means of action is the
State, their infallible means of expression, universal suf-
frage—whence spring parliaments imbued with socialist
thought—or the strong will of a charismatic dictator, who
invariably guides the masses to the realization of their
own will.
3. REDEMPTION BY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY:
THE REVOLUTIONARY UTOPIA
In one way or another, whether placing all its confi-
dence in the individual alone, the masses, or the State, it is
in man that the Revolution trusts. Man, self-sufficient
thanks to science and technology, can resolve all his
problems, eliminate pain, poverty, ignorance, insecurity,
in short, everything we refer to as the effect of Original or
actual sin.
The utopia toward which the Revolution is leading us
is a world whose countries, united in a universal republic,
are but geographic designations, a world with neither
social nor economic inequalities, run by science and tech-
nology, by propaganda and psychology, in order to attain,
without the supernatural, the definitive happiness of man.
In such a world, the Redemption by Our Lord Jesus
Christ has no place, for man will have overcome evil with
68 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
science and will have made the earth a technologically
delightful paradise. And he will hope to overcome death
one day by the indefinite prolongation of life.
CHAPTER XII
The Pacifist and Antimilitarist
Character of the Revolution
The pacifist and therefore antimilitarist character of
the Revolution is easily grasped in light of the preceding
chapter.
1. SCIENCE WILL BRING AN END TO Wark, THE
MILITARY, AND POLICE
In the technological paradise of the Revolution, peace
has to be perpetual, for science has shown that war is evil,
and technology can overcome all its causes.
Accordingly, there is a fundamental incompatibility
between the Revolution and the armed forces. These will
have to be abolished. In the universal republic there will
only be a police force—which will be abolished as soon as
scientific and technological advances have completed the
eradication of crime.
70 PART I, THE REVOLUTION
2. THE DOCTRINAL INCOMPATIBILITY BETWEEN THE
REVOLUTION AND THE UNIFORM
The uniform, by its mere presence, implicitly testifies
to some truths that, although undoubtedly somewhat ge-
neric, are certainly of a counter-revolutionary character:
— the existence of values that are greater than life it-
self and for which one should be willing to die—which is
contrary to the socialist mentality, wholly characterized
by abhorrence of risk and pain and by adoration of secu-
rity and utmost attachment to earthly life;
— the existence of morality, for the military condition
is entirely based upon ideas of honor, of force placed at the
service of good and turned against evil, and so on.
3. THE TEMPERAMENT OF THE REVOLUTION Is
CONTRARY TO THE MILITARY LIFE
Lastly, there is a temperamental antipathy between the
Revolution and the military spirit. The Revolution, before
it has full control, is verbose, declamatory, and scheming.
The resolution of matters in a direct, drastic, straightfor-
ward way—the military way---displeases what we could
call the present temperament of the Revolution. We stress
present in allusion to the current stage of the Revolution
among us, because there is nothing more despotic and
cruel than the Revolution when it is omnipotent. Russia
has provided an cloquent example of this. But even there
the divergence remained, since the military spirit is quite
different from that of the executioner.
Having analyzed the revolutionary utopia in its various
aspects, we close the study of the Revolution.
Part IIT
The
Counter-Revolution
CHAPTER I
The Counter-Revolution Is a
Reaction
1, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION: A SPECIFIC AND
DIRECT FIGHT AGAINST THE REVOLUTION
If such is the Revolution, what is the Counter-
Revolution? In the literal sense of the word—therefore
stripped of the illegitimate and demagogic connotations
given it in everyday language—the Counter-Revolution is
a reaction. That is to say, it is an action directed against
another action. It is to the Revolution what, for example,
the Counter-Reformation is to the Pseudo-Reformation.
2. THE NOBILITY OF THIS REACTION
The Counter-Revolution derives its nobility and impor-
tance from this character of reaction. Indeed, if the Revo-
lution is killing us, nothing is more indispensable than a
reaction that aims to crush it. To be adverse in principle to
a counter-revolutionary reaction is the same as desiring to
deliver the world over to the Revolution’s dominion.
74 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
3. A REACTION TURNED AGAINST PRESENT-DAY
ADVERSARIES
It must be added that the Counter-Revolution, in this
light, is not and cannot be a movement in the clouds, one
that fights phantoms. It has to be the Counter-Revolution
of the twentieth century, waged against the Revolution as
it is in fact today. Therefore, it has to be waged against the
revolutionary passions as they are inflamed today, revolu-
tionary ideas as formulated today, revolutionary ambi-
ences as seen today, revolutionary art and culture as they
are today, and against the individuals and currents of opin-
ion that, at whatever level, are the most active promoters
of the Revolution today. The Counter-Revolution is not,
then, a mere recitation of the evil deeds of the Revolution
in the past, but an effort to bar its course in the present.
4. THE MODERNITY AND INTEGRITY OF THE
COUNTER-REVOLUTION
The modernity of the Counter-Revolution does not con-
sist in ignoring the Revolution nor in making a pact with
it, even in the slightest degree. To the contrary, it consists
in knowing the Revolution in its unchanging essence and
in its relevant contemporary accidents, and combating the
former and the latter intelligently, astutely, and systemati-
cally, using every licit means and the assistance of every
child of light.
CHAPTER I
Reaction and
Historical Immobility
1. Wuat Is To BE RESTORED
If the Revolution is disorder, the Counter-Revolution is
the restoration of order. And by order we mean the peace
of Christ in the Reign of Christ, that is, Christian civiliza-
tion, austere and hierarchical, fundamentally sacral, anti-
egalitarian, and antiliberal.
2. WuHaT Is To BE INNOVATED
However, by force of the historical law according to
which immobility does not exist in temporal things, the
order born of the Counter-Revolution must have its own
characteristics that will make it different from the order
that existed before the Revolution. Of course, this affirma-
tion does not refer to principles but to accidents. These
accidents are, nevertheless, of such importance that they
deserve to be mentioned.
Since it is impossible for us to go into this matter at
length, we will merely note that, in general, when a frac-
76 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
ture or a laceration occurs in an organism, the zone of
mending or healing is marked by special safeguards. It is
the loving care of Providence acting through secondary
causes against the possibilities of a new disaster. This can
be observed in the case of broken bones, whose mend
forms as a reinforcement in the very zone of the fracture,
or in the case of scar tissue. This is a material image of an
analogous fact that takes place in the spiritual order. As a
general rule, the sinner who truly amends has a greater
horror for sin than he had in the best years before his fall.
Such is the history of the penitent saints. So, also, after
each trial, the Church emerges specially armed against the
evil that tried to prostrate her. A typical example of this is
the Counter-Reformation.
By virtue of this law, the order born of the Counter-
Revolution will have to shine even more than that of the
Middle Ages in the three principal points in which the
latter was wounded by the Revolution:
e A profound respect for the rights of the Church and of
the Papacy, and the sacralization, to the utmost possible
extent, of the values of temporal life, all of this out of
opposition to secularism, interconfessionalism, atheism,
and pantheism, as well as their respective consequences.
eA spirit of hierarchy marking all aspects of society
and State, of culture and life, out of opposition to the
egalitarian metaphysics of the Revolution.
eA diligence in detecting and combating evil in its
embryonic or veiled forms, in fulminating it with execra-
tion and a note of infamy, and in punishing it with un-
breakable firmness in all its manifestations, particularly
in those that offend against orthodoxy and purity of
customs, in opposition to the liberal metaphysics of the
Revolution and its tendency to give free rein and protec-
tion to evil.
CHAPTER II
The Counter-Revolution and the
Craving After Novelties
The tendency of so many of our contemporaries, chil-
dren of the Revolution, is to unrestrictedly love the pres-
ent, adore the future, and unconditionally consign the past
to scorn and hatred. This tendency gives rise to a series
of misunderstandings about the Counter-Revolution that
should be brought to an end. Above all, it seems to many
that the traditionalist and conservative character of the
Counter-Revolution renders it a born enemy of human
progress.
1. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS TRADITIONALIST
A. Reason
As we have seen, the Counter-Revolution is an effort
developed in terms of the Revolution. The Revolution
constantly turns against a whole legacy of Christian insti-
tutions, doctrines, customs, and ways of being, feeling,
and thinking that we received from our forefathers and that
78 PART I, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
are not yet completely abolished. The Counter-Revolution
is therefore the defender of Christian traditions.
B. The Smoking Wick
The Revolution attacks Christian civilization in a
manner that is more or less like that of a certain tree of
the Brazilian forest. This tree, the strangler fig Urostigma
olearia, by wrapping itself around the trunk of another
tree, completely covers it and kills it. In its “moderate”
and low-velocity currents, the Revolution approached
Christian civilization in order to wrap itself around it and
kill it. We are in a period in which this strange phenom-
enon of destruction is still incomplete. In other words,
we are in a hybrid situation wherein what we would
almost call the mortal remains of Christian civilization,
and the aroma and remote action of many traditions only
recently abolished yet still somehow alive in the memo-
ry of man, coexist with many revolutionary institutions
and customs.
Faced with the struggle between a splendid Christian
tradition in which life still stirs and a revolutionary action
inspired by the mania for novelties to which Leo XIII
referred in the opening words to the encyclical Rerum
novarum, it is only natural that the true counter-revolu-
tionary be a born defender of the treasury of good tradi-
tions, for these are the values of the Christian past that
remain and must be saved. In this sense, the counter-revo-
lutionary acts like Our Lord, Who did not come to extin-
guish the smoking wick nor to break the bruised reed.’
Therefore, he must lovingly try to save all these Christian
traditions. A counter-revolutionary action is, essentially, a
traditionalist action.
1. Cf. Matt. 12:20.
CHAPTER III 79
C. False Traditionalism
The traditionalist spirit of the Counter-Revolution has
nothing in common with a false and narrow traditional-
ism, which conserves certain rites, styles, or customs
merely out of love for old forms and without any appre-
ciation for the doctrine that gave rise to them. This would
be archaeologism, not a sound and living traditionalism.
2. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS CONSERVATIVE
Is the Counter-Revolution conservative? In one sense,
it is, and profoundly so. And in another sense, it 1s not, and
also profoundly so.
If it is a question of conserving something of the present
that is good and deserves to live, the Counter-Revolution is
conservative.
But if it is a question of perpetuating the hybrid situ-
ation in which we find ourselves, of keeping the revolu-
tionary process at its present stage, while remaining
immobile like a statue of salt, on the sidelines of history
and of time, embracing alike what is good and evil in our
century, thus seeking a perpetual and harmonious co-
existence of good and evil, then, the Counter-Revolution
neither is nor can be conservative.
3. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS AN ESSENTIAL
CONDITION FOR AUTHENTIC PROGRESS
Does the Counter-Revolution favor progress? Yes, if
the progress is authentic. No, if it is the march toward the
revolutionary utopia.
In its material aspect, genuine progress consists in the
rightful use of the forces of nature according to the law
of God, for the service of man. For this reason, the
80 PART I, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Counter-Revolution makes no pacts with today’s hyper-
trophied technicalism, with its adoration of novelties,
speed, and machines, nor with the deplorable tendency to
organize human society mechanistically. These are ex-
cesses that Pius XII condemned profoundly and precisely.’
Nor is the material progress of a people the main ele-
ment of progress in Christian understanding. The latter lies
above all in the full development of the powers of the soul
and the ascent of mankind toward moral perfection. Thus,
a counter-revolutionary conception of progress supposes
the prevalence of spiritual values over material considera-
tions. Accordingly, it is proper to the Counter-Revolution
to promote, among individuals and the multitudes, a far
greater esteem for all that has to do with true religion, phi-
losophy, art, and literature than for what has to do with the
good of the body and the exploitation of matter.
Finally, to clearly differentiate between the revolution-
ary and counter-revolutionary concepts of progress, it is
necessary to note that the counter-revolutionary takes into
account that the world will always be a valley of tears and
a passageway to heaven, while the revolutionary considers
that progress should make the earth a paradise in which
man lives happily with no thought of eternity.
From the very notion of rightful progress, one can see
that the revolutionary process is its contrary.
Thus, the Counter-Revolution is an essential condition
for the preservation of the normal development of authen-
tic progress and the defeat of the revolutionary utopia,
which has only a facade of progress.
2. Cf. Christmas broadcast, 1957, in Yzermans, The Major Addresses
of Pope Pius XII, vol. 2, p. 233.
CHAPTER IV
What Isa
Counter-Revolutionary?
What is a counter-revolutionary? One may answer the
question in two ways:
1. IN ACTUALITY
The actual counter-revolutionary is one who:
— knows the Revolution, order, and the Counter-Revo-
lution in their respective spirits, doctrines, and methods;
— loves the Counter-Revolution and Christian order,
and hates the Revolution and “anti-order”;
— makes of this love and this hatred the axis around
which revolve all his ideals, preferences, and activities.
Of course this attitude of soul does not require higher
education. Saint Joan of Arc was no theologian but as-
tounded her judges by the theological profundity of her
thoughts. So also, animated by an admirable understand-
ing of the Revolution’s spirit and aims, simple peasants of
Navarre, for instance, or of Vendée or Tyrol, have often
been the best soldiers of the Counter-Revolution.
82° _ PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
2. IN POTENTIALITY
Potential counter-revolutionaries are those who have
one or another of the opinions and ways of feeling of
revolutionaries, either because of inadvertence or some
other occasional reason, but without the very depth of their
personalities being affected by the spirit of the Revolution.
Alerted, enlightened, and oriented, these persons easily
embrace a counter-revolutionary position. And in this
they are different from the “semi-counterrevolutionaries”
mentioned earlier.'
1. See Part I, Chapter 9.
CHAPTER V
The Counter-Revolution’s Tactics
The tactics of the Counter-Revolution can be looked at
in the light of persons, groups, or currents of opinion in
terms of three types of minds: the actual counter-revolu-
tionary, the potential counter-revolutionary, and the revo-
lutionary.
1. IN RELATION TO THE ACTUAL
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY
The actual counter-revolutionary is not as rare as one
might think at first. He has a clear vision of things, a
fundamental love for coherence, and a strong soul. For
this reason he has a lucid notion of the disorders of the
contemporary world and of the catastrophes looming on
the horizon. But his very lucidity makes him perceive the
full extent of the isolation in which he so frequently finds
himself, in a chaos that to him appears to have no solution.
Thus, many times, the counter-revolutionary keeps a dis-
heartened silence—a sad condition: “Vae Soli” (“Woe to
him that is alone”), the Scriptures say.’
1. Eccles. 4:10.
84 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
A counter-revolutionary action must seek, above all, to
detect such persons, acquaint them with each other, and
lead them to support each other in the public profession of
their convictions. This can be done in two different ways:
A. Individual Action
This action must be carried out first of all at the indi-
vidual level. Nothing is more effective than the frank and
proud counter-revolutionary stand taken by a young col-
lege student, an officer, a teacher, a priest especially, an
aristocrat, or a blue-collar worker who is influential
within his circle. The first reaction will sometimes be one
of indignation. But if he perseveres, after a period that
will vary depending on circumstances, gradually others
will join him.
B. Combined Action
These individual contacts naturally tend to raise up in
the different milieus several counter-revolutionaries who
unite in a family of souls whose strength is multiplied by
the very fact of their union.
2. IN RELATION TO THE POTENTIAL
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY
Counter-revolutionaries should present the Revolution
and the Counter-Revolution in all their aspects: religious,
political, social, economic, cultural, artistic, and so on. This
is necessary because potential counter-revolutionaries
generally see the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution
through only one particular facet. Through it they can and
should be attracted to the total vision of the Revolution
and the Counter-Revolution. A counter-revolutionary who
CHAPTER V__ 85
argues in only one sphere—for example, politics—limits
his field of attraction greatly, exposing his action to steril-
ity and thereby to decay and death.
3. IN RELATION TO THE REVOLUTIONARY
A. The Counter-Revolutionary Initiative
There are no neutrals in face of the Revolution and the
Counter-Revolution. There may indeed be noncombat-
ants, whose will or velleities are in one of the two camps,
whether consciously or not. By revolutionaries we mean,
then, not only the integral and declared partisans of the
Revolution but also the “semi-counterrevolutionaries.”
The Revolution has progressed, as we have seen, by
hiding its complete face, its true spirit, and its ultimate
aims.
The best way to refute it among revolutionaries is to
show it in its entirety, whether as regards its spirit and the
general outline of its action, or as regards each of its
apparently innocent and insignificant manifestations or
maneuvers. To thus snatch away its veils is to deal it the
harshest of blows.
For this reason, the counter-revolutionary effort must
dedicate itself to this task with the greatest diligence.
Secondarily, of course, other resources of well-con-
ducted dialectics are indispensable for the success of a
counter-revolutionary action.
There are certain possibilities of working together with
the “semi-counterrevolutionary” as well as with the revo-
lutionary who has counter-revolutionary “clots.” This
collaboration creates a special problem: Up to what point
is it prudent? As we see it, the struggle against the Revo-
lution can only be properly developed by uniting persons
who are radically and entirely free of the virus of the
86 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Revolution. It 1s very conceivable that counter-revolu-
tionary groups may be able to work with the aforesaid
elements for some concrete objectives. But to admit a
total and continuous collaboration with persons infected
with any influence of the Revolution is the most flagrant
of imprudences and the cause of perhaps most counter-
revolutionary failures.
B. The Revolutionary Counteroffensive
As a tule, the revolutionary is petulant, verbose, and
strutting when he has no or only weak adversaries to face
him. However, if someone proudly and daringly confronts
him, he grows quiet and organizes a campaign of silence.
One perceives amid the silence, however, the discreet buzz
of calumny or some murmuring against the “excessive
logic” of his adversary. But it is a confused and shamed
silence that is never broken by any worthwhile rejoinder.
In face of this silence of confusion and defeat, we could
say to the victorious counter-revolutionary the spirited
words written by Veuillot on a certain occasion: “Question
the silence, and no answer will it make.”
4, ELITES AND MASSES IN THE
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY TACTICS
To the extent possible, the Counter-Revolution should
try to win over the multitudes. However, it should not
make this its chief goal in the short run. The counter-revo-
lutionary has no reason to be discouraged because of the
fact that the great majority of men are not presently on his
side. Indeed, an exact study of history shows us that it was
not the masses who made the Revolution. They moved in
2. Louis Veuillot, Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Lethielleux Librairie-
Editeur, n.d.), vol. 33, p. 349.
CHAPTER V 87
a revolutionary direction because they had revolutionary
elites behind them. If they had had elites of the opposite
orientation behind them, they likely would have moved
in the opposite direction. An objective view of history
shows that the factor of mass is secondary; the principal
factor is the formation of elites. For this formation, the
counter-revolutionary can always use the resources of his
individual action, and can therefore obtain good results in
spite of the shortage of material and technical means with
which, at times, he may contend.
CHAPTER VI
The Counter-Revolution’s
Means of Action
1. A PREFERENCE FOR GREAT MEANS OF ACTION
Of course, in principle, counter-revolutionary action
deserves to have at its disposal the best means: television,
radio, major press, and a rational, efficient, and brilliant
publicity. The true counter-revolutionary should always
tend to use these means, overcoming the defeatist attitude
of some of his companions who immediately surrender
all hope of using them because they constantly see them
in the hands of the children of darkness.
However, we must recognize that, in point of fact,
counter-revolutionary action will often have to be under-
taken without these resources.
2. THE UsE OF MODEST MEANS: THEIR EFFICACY
Even so, and with the humblest of means, counter-revo-
lutionary action can obtain very appreciable results if
such means are utilized with uprightness of spirit and
CHAPTER VI 89
intelligence. As we have seen, a counter-revolutionary
action is conceivable even if reduced to mere individual
activity. But it is inconceivable without individual action,
which, if well accomplished, opens the way for every
progress.
Small journals of countcr-revolutionary inspiration, if
their standard is good, are surprisingly effective, especially
in the foremost task of acquainting counter-revolutionaries
with one another.
Equally effective, or more so, are books, a speakers’
platform, or a professorship at the service of the Counter-
Revolution.
CHAPTER VII
Obstacles to the
Counter-Revolution
1. PITFALLS To BE AVOIDED AMONG
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES
The pitfalls to be avoided among counter-revolution-
artes very often consist of certain bad habits of agents of
the Counter-Revolution.
The themes of counter-revolutionary meetings or pub-
lications should be carefully chosen. The Counter-Revo-
lution should always be ideological in its approach, even
when dealing with matters fraught with detail and inci-
dentals. To go over questions of current or recent party
politics may be useful, for example. But to overempha-
size small personal questions, to make a struggle with
local idcological adversarics the main objective of the
counter-revolutionary action, to portray the Counter-
Revolution as if it were a mere nostalgia (even though this
nostalgia is, of course, legitimate) or a mere obligation of
personal loyalty, however holy and just, is to depict the
particular as if it were the general, the part as if it were
CHAPTER VII ; 91
the whole. It is to mutilate the cause one desires to serve.
2. SLOGANS OF THE REVOLUTION
At other times, these obstacles consist of revolutionary
slogans that are frequently regarded as dogma even in the
best circles.
A. “The Counter-Revolution Is Out of Date”
The most prevalent and harmful of these slogans claims
that the Counter-Revolution cannot flourish in our day
because it is contrary to the spirit of the times. History, it
is said, does not turn back.
If this peculiar principle were true the Catholic religion
would not exist, for it cannot be denied that the Gospel
was radically contrary to the milieu in which Our Lord
Jesus Christ and the Apostles preached. Also, Germano-
Romanic Catholic Spain would not have existed, for noth-
ing is more like a resurrection, and hence in a certain way
like a return to the past, than the full reconstitution of the
Christian grandeur of Spain after the eight centuries from
Covadonga to the fall of Granada. The Renaissance, so
dear to revolutionaries, was itself, from various points of
view at least, a return to a cultural and artistic naturalism
that had been petrified for over a millennium.
History, then, contains comings and goings along the
paths of good and the paths of evil.
Incidentally, whenever the Revolution considers some-
thing to be consistent with the spirit of the times, caution
has to be exercised, for all too often it is rubbish from
some pagan time that it wishes to restore. What is new, for
example, about divorce, nudism, tyranny, or demagoguery,
all of which were so widespread in the ancient world? And
why is the advocate of divorce regarded as modern while
92 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
the defender of indissoluble marriage is considered out-
dated? The Revolution’s concept of modern amounts to
everything that gives free rein to pride and egalitarianism
as well as to pleasurce-seeking and liberalism.
B. “The Counter-Revolution Is Negativistic”
According to another slogan of the Revolution, the
Counter-Revolution, by its very name, defines itself as
something negative and therefore sterile. This is a mere
play on words, for, based on the fact that the negation of
a negation corresponds to an affirmation, the human spirit
expresses many of its most positive concepts in a negative
form: infallibility, independence, innocence, and others.
Would it be negativism to fight for any of thesc values
just because of their negative formulation? Did the First
Vatican Council perform a negativistic work when it
defined papal infallibility? Is the Immaculate Conception
a negativistic prerogative of the Mother of God?
If insistence on negating, attacking, and continuously
watching the adversary is termed “negativistic” in current
specch, then perforce the Counter-Revolution, without
being merely a negation, has in its essence something fun-
damentally and wholesomely negativistic. It is, as we have
said, a movement directed against another movement, and
it is unthinkable for one adversary in a fight not to have his
eyes fixed on the other, maintaining an attitude of po-
lemics, attack, and counterattack.
C. “The Counter-Revolutionary Is Argumentative”
A third catch phrase criticizes the intellectual works of
counter-revolutionaries for their negativistic and polemi-
cal character, whereby they overemphasize the refutation
of error instead of simply explaining the truth in a clear
CHAPTER VII _ 93
manner indifferent to the correction of error. These works
are deemed counterproductive, for they irritate the adver-
sary and drive him away. Save for possible excesses, this
seemingly negativistic approach is profoundly justified.
As previously stated, the doctrine of the Revolution was
contained in the denials of Luther and the early revolu-
tionaries, but it was only made explicit very gradually
over centuries. Accordingly, counter-revolutionary authors
sensed from the very beginning—and legitimately so—
that in all revolutionary formulations there was something
which transcended the formulations themselves. Within
each stage of the revolutionary process it is much more
important to consider the mentality of the Revolution than
simply the ideology enunciated in that particular stage. If
such work is to be profound, efficient, and entirely objec-
tive, the progress of the Revolution’s march must be fol-
lowed step by step in a painstaking effort to make explicit
what is implicit in the revolutionary process. Only in this
way is it possible to attack the Revolution as it should be
attacked. All this has obliged counter-revolutionaries to
keep their eyes fixed on the Revolution, while claborating
and affirming their theses in terms of its errors. In this
arduous intellectual labor, the doctrines of truth and order
that exist in the sacred deposit of the Magisterium of the
Church constitute the treasury from which the counter-
revolutionary draws things new and old' to refute the
Revolution as he sees deeper and deeper into its tenebrous
abysses.
Thus, in several of its most important aspects, counter-
revolutionary work is wholesomely negativistic and po-
lemical. For analogous reasons, the ecclesiastical Magis-
terium more often than not defines truths in relation to the
heresies arising in the course of history, and it formulates
these truths as a condemnation of the opposing errors. The
1. Cf. Matt. 13:52.
94 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Church has never feared that she would harm souls by
acting in this way.
3. WRONG ATTITUDES IN FACE OF THE
REVOLUTION’S SLOGANS
A. Ignoring Revolutionary Slogans
The counter-revolutionary effort must not be bookish.
In other words, it cannot content itself with dialectics
against the Revolution at a purely scientific, academic
level. While recognizing the great, even very great, im-
portance of this level, the Counter-Revolution must ha-
bitually keep its sights trained on the Revolution as
thought, felt, and lived by public opinion as a whole. In
this sense, counter-revolutionaries ought to give very spe-
cial importance to the refutation of revolutionary catch
phrases.
B. Eliminating the Polemical Aspects of
Counter-Revolutionary Action
Sadly, the idea of presenting the Counter-Revolution
in a more “sympathetic” and “positive” light by prevent-
ing it from attacking the Revolution is the most efficient
way to impoverish its content and dynamism.’
Anyone who employs this lamentable tactic displays
the same lack of sense as a chief of state who, in face of
enemy troops crossing his border, were to halt all armed
resistance in the hope of neutralizing the invader by gain-
ing his sympathy. In reality, he would destroy the impetus
of the reaction without stopping the enemy. In other
words, he would surrender his homeland.
2. See Part II, Chapter 8, 3, B.
CHAPTER VII 95
This does not mean that the language of the counter-
revolutionary should not show nuances befitting the cir-
cumstances.
The Divine Master, when preaching in Judea, which
was under the proximate influence of the perfidious Phari-
sees, used strong language. On the contrary, in Galilee,
where the simple-hearted people predominated and the
influence of the Pharisees was smaller, His language was
more tutorial and less polemical.
CHAPTER VIII
The Processive Character of the
Counter-Revolution, and the
Counter-Revolutionary “Shock”
1. THERE Is A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
It is evident that, like the Revolution, the Counter-
Revolution is a process, and therefore its progressive and
methodical march toward order can be studied.
Nevertheless, there are some characteristics that pro-
foundly differentiate this march from the movement of the
Revolution toward complete disorder. This results from
the fact that the dynamism of good is radically different
from the dynamism of evil.
2. TYPICAL ASPECTS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY
PROCESS
A. In the Rapid March
When discussing the two speeds of the Revolution, we
saw that some souls are gripped by its maxims in a single
CHAPTER VIII 97
moment and at once draw all the consequences of error.'
B. In the Slow March
We saw also that others accept the revolutionary doc-
trine slowly, step by step. In many cases, this process
develops continuously down through generations. A
“semi-counterrevolutionary” who is strongly opposed to
the paroxysms of the Revolution has a son who is less
opposed to them, a grandson who is indifferent to them,
and a great-grandson who is fully integrated in the revolu-
tionary flux. The reason for this, as we have said, is that
certain families have in their mentality, subconscious, and
ways of feeling a remnant of counter-revolutionary habits
and leaven that holds them partly bound to order. In such
families the revolutionary corruption is not as dynamic,
and therefore error can only advance in their spirits step by
step, as it were, disguising itself.
This same slowness of rhythm explains how many peo-
ple change their opinions enormously in the course of their
lives. For example, as adolescents, they have a severe
opinion about indecent fashions, according to the environ-
ment in which they live. Later, as customs “evolve” in a
more dissolute direction, these persons adapt themselves
to the successive fashions. As they grow old, they applaud
styles of dress that in their youth they would have strongly
condemned. They reached this point because they have
passed slowly and imperceptibly through the nuanced
stages of the Revolution. They had neither the perspicacity
nor the energy required to perceive where they were being
led by the Revolution, which was acting within and around
them. Gradually, they ended up going perhaps even as far
as a revolutionary of their own age who in his adolescence
had opted for the first speed. Truth and goodness lie de-
1. See Part I, Chapter 6, 4.
98 PART I, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
feated in these souls, but not so defeated that, in face of a
grave error and a grave evil, they might not suffer a start
that at times, in a victorious and salvific way, will make
them perceive the perverse depth of the Revolution and
lead them to take a categorical and systematic attitude of
opposition to all its manifestations. To avoid these whole-
some shocks of the soul and these counter-revolutionary
crystallizations, the Revolution moves step by step.
3. How To DESTROY THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
If this is how the Revolution leads the immense majori-
ty of its victims, by what means can one of them separate
himself from this process? Is this means different from
that by which persons dragged by the high-speed revolu-
tionary march convert to the Counter-Revolution?
A. The Many Ways of the Holy Ghost
No one can set limits to the inexhaustible variety of
God’s ways within souls. It would be absurd to attempt to
reduce such a complex matter to schemata. One cannot,
then, in this matter, go beyond indicating some errors to be
avoided and some prudent attitudes to be proposed.
Every conversion is a fruit of the action of the Holy
Ghost, Who speaks to each one according to his necessi-
ties, sometimes with majestic severity and at other times
with maternal suavity, yet never lying.
B. Nothing Should Be Hidden
Thus, in the journey from error to truth, the soul does
not have to contend with the crafty silences of the Revo-
lution nor with its fraudulent metamorphoses. Nothing it
ought to know is hidden from it. Truth and goodness are
thoroughly taught to it by the Church. Progress in good-
CHAPTER VIII 99
hess is not secured by systematically hiding from men the
ultimate goal of their formation, but by showing it and
rendering it ever more desirable.
The Counter-Revolution must not, then, disguise its
whole breadth. It must adopt the eminently wise rules laid
down by Saint Pius X as the normative code of behavior
for the true apostle: “It is neither loyal nor worthy to hide
Catholic status, disguising it with some equivocal banner,
as if such status were damaged or smuggled goods.”
Catholics should not “veil the more important precepts
of the Gospel out of fear of being perhaps less heeded or
even completely abandoned.” To this the Holy Pontiff
judiciously added:
No doubt it will not be alien to prudence, when pro-
posing the truth, to make use of a certain temporization
when it is a matter of enlightening men who are hostile
to our institutions and entirely removed from God.
Wounds that have to be cut into, as Saint Gregory said,
should first be touched with a delicate hand. But such
skill would take on the aspect of carnal prudence if
made a constant and common norm of conduct. This is
all the more so since in this way one would seem to
have very little regard for Divine grace, which is con-
ferred not only upon the priesthood and its ministers but
upon all the faithful of Christ, so that our words and acts
might move the souls of these men.’
C. The “Shock” of the Great Conversions
Though we have decried the attempt to reduce this
2, Saint Pius X, letter to Count Medolago Albani, President of the
Socioeconomic Union of Italy, November 22, 1909, Bonne Press, Paris,
vol. 5, p. 76.
3. Saint Pius X, encyclical Jucunda sane, March 12, 1904, Bonne
Presse, Paris, vol. 1, p. 158.
4. Ibid.
100 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
matter to simple schemata, it nevertheless seems to us that
complete and conscious adherence to the Revolution as it
concretely presents itself is an immense sin, a radical
apostasy, from which one can only return by means of an
equally radical conversion.
Now, according to history, it seems that the great con-
versions usually occur by a fulminating thrust of the soul
caused by grace on the occasion of a given internal or
external fact. This thrust is different in each case but often
has certain similar features. In fact, when a revolutionary
converts to the Counter-Revolution, this thrust not infre-
quently takes place along the following general lines:
a. In the soul of the hardened sinner who, in the rapid
march of the process, went immediately to the extreme of
the Revolution, there are always resources of intelligence
and common sense and tendencies toward good that are
more or less defined. Although God never deprives these
souls of sufficient grace, He frequently waits until they
have reached the very depths of misery, wherein He sud-
denly brings home to them the enormity of their errors and
sins as if in a fulgurant flash. Only when he had fallen into
the state where he would fain have filled his belly with the
husks of the swine did the prodigal son really see himself
as he actually was and return to his father’s house.’
b. In the lukewarm and shortsighted soul, which is slow-
ly slipping down the ramp of the Revolution, there still act
certain supernatural leavens not entirely refused; values of
tradition, order, and religion still glow like embers under
the ash. Such souls, by a wholesome shock in a moment of
extreme disgrace, may also open their eyes and instantly
revive everything that was pining and wasting away with-
in them; it is the rekindling of the smoking wick.‘
5. Cf. Luke 15:16-19.
6. Cf. Matt. 12:20.
CHAPTER VIII 101
D. The Likelihood of This Shock in Our Days
Now, since all humanity finds itself in the imminence
of a catastrophe, this seems to be precisely the great
moment prepared by the mercy of God. Both high- and
low-speed revolutionaries can open their eyes in the terri-
ble twilight in which we live and be converted to God.
Without demagogucry, without exaggeration, but at the
same time without weakness, the counter-revolutionary
must zealously take advantage of the tremendous specta-
cle of this darkness to bring the facts home to the children
of the Revolution, and thus produce in them the saving
“flash.” To boldly point out the perils that beset us is an
essential feature of an authentically counter-revolutionary
action.
E. Showing the Whole Face of the Revolution
It is not sufficient to point out the risk that our civiliza-
tion may disappear altogether. We must know how to
reveal amid the chaos that envelopes us the whole face of
the Revolution in its immense hideousness. Whenever this
face is revealed, outbursts of vigorous reaction appear.
For this reason, during the French Revolution and
throughout the nineteenth century, the counter-revolution-
ary movement in France was stronger than ever before.
Never had the face of the Revolution been seen so well.
The immensity of the maelstrom in which the old order of
things had been shipwrecked had suddenly opened the
eyes of many people to a host of truths silenced or denied
by the Revolution down through the centuries. Above all,
the spirit of the Revolution had become clear to them in all
its malice and in all its profound connections with ideas
and habits long considered innocent by most people.
Thus, the counter-revolutionary must frequently unmask
102 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
the whole face of the Revolution in order to exorcise the
spell it casts upon its victims.
F. Pointing Out the Metaphysical Aspects
of the Counter-Revolution
The quintessence of the revolutionary spirit consists, as
we have seen, in hating, in principle and on the meta-
physical plane, all inequality and all law, especially Moral
Law. Moreover, pride, rebelliousness, and impurity are
precisely the factors that most impel mankind along the
way of the Revolution.’
Therefore, one of the very important parts of counter-
revolutionary work is to teach a love for inequality con-
sidered on the metaphysical plane, for the principle of
authority, and for Moral Law and purity.
G. The Two Stages of the Counter-Revolution
a. With the radical change of the revolutionary into
a counter-revolutionary, the first stage of the Counter-
Revolution ends in him.
b. The second stage may take quite a long time. In it,
the soul proceeds to adjust all his ideas and ways of
feeling to the position taken in the act of conversion.
These two great and quite distinct stages delineating
the counter-revolutionary process are presented here as
they occur in a soul considered by itself. Mutatis mutan-
dis, they may occur in large groups and even in whole
peoples as well.
7. See Part I, Chapter 7, 3.
CHAPTER IX
The Driving Force of the
Counter-Revolution
There is a driving force of the Counter-Revolution, just
as there is one of the Revolution.
1. VIRTUE AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
We have singled out the dynamism of the human pas-
sions unleashed in a metaphysical hatred against God,
virtue, good, and especially against hierarchy and purity,
as the most potent driving force of the Revolution. Like-
wise, there exists a counter-revolutionary dynamism,
though of an entirely different nature. Passions as such
(here referred to in their technical sense) are morally indif-
ferent; it is their disorderliness that makes them bad.
However, while regulated, they are good and obey the will
and reason faithfully. It is in the vigor of soul that comes
to a man because God governs his reason, his reason dom-
inates his will, and his will dominates his sensibility, that
we must look for the screne, noble, and highly effective
driving force of the Counter-Revolution.
104 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
2. SUPERNATURAL LIFE AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Such vigor of soul cannot be explained unless super-
natural life is taken into account. The role of grace con-
sists precisely in enlightening the intelligence, strength-
ening the will, and tempering the sensibility so that they
turn toward good. Hence, the soul gains immeasurably
from supernatural life, which elevates it above the mis-
eries of fallen nature, indeed, above the level of human
nature itself. In this strength of the Christian soul lies the
dynamism of the Counter-Revolution.
3. THE INVINCIBILITY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
One might ask, of what value is this dynamism? We
respond that in thesis it is incalculable and certainly
superior to that of the Revolution: “Omnia possum in eo
qui me confortat”’ (“I can do all things in Him who
strengthens me”).!
When men resolve to cooperate with the grace of God,
the marvels of history are worked: the conversion of the
Roman Empire; the formation of the Middle Ages; the
reconquest of Spain, starting from Covadonga; all the
events that result from the great resurrections of soul of
which peoples are also capable. These resurrections are
invincible, because nothing can defeat a people that is vir-
tuous and truly loves God.
t. Phil. 4:13.
CHAPTER X
The Counter-Revolution, Sin,
and the Redemption
1. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION SHOULD REVIVE
THE NOTION OF GOOD AND EVIL
One of the most significant missions of the Counter-
Revolution is reestablishing or reviving the distinction
between good and evil, the notion of sin in thesis, of
Original Sin, and of actual sin. When performed with a
profound compenetration of the spirit of the Church, this
task does not produce despair of the Divine Mercy, hy-
pochondria, misanthropy, or the like, so frequently men-
tioned by certain authors more or less imbued with the
maxims of the Revolution.
2. How To REVIVE THE NOTION OF GOOD AND EVIL
The notion of good and evil can be revived in various
ways, including:
e Avoiding all formulations that smack of secularist or
106 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
interdenominational morality, because secularism and in-
terdenominationalism logically lead to amorality.
e Opportunely pointing out that God has the right to be
obeyed and that, therefore, His Commandments are true
laws, which we ought to observe in the spirit of obedience
and not simply because they please us.
e Emphasizing that the law of God is intrinsically good
and according to the order of the universe, in which the
perfection of the Creator is mirrored. For this reason, it
should not only be obeyed, but loved; and evil should not
only be shunned, but hated.
e Spreading the notion of a reward and of a chastise-
ment after death.
e Favoring social customs and laws in which upright-
ness is honored and wickedness suffers public sanctions.
eFavoring customs and laws meant to prevent prox-
imate occasions of sin and even those conditions that,
having the mere appearance of evil, may be harmful to
public morality.
eInsisting on the effects of Original Sin in man, his
frailty, the fruitfulness of the Redemption by Our Lord
Jesus Christ, and the need for grace, prayer, and vigilance
in order for man to persevere.
e Making use of every opportunity to indicate the mis-
sion of the Church as the teacher of virtue, the fountain of
grace, and the irreconcilable enemy of error and sin.
CHAPTER XI
The Counter-Revolution and
Temporal Society
The Counter-Revolution and temporal society is a
theme that has been treated in depth from various stand-
points in many valuable studies. This study, since it cannot
encompass the entire subject, restricts itself to giving the
more general principles of a counter-revolutionary tem-
poral order' and to analyzing the relations between the
Counter-Revolution and some of the major organizations
that fight to better the temporal order.
1. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND
SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS
Within temporal society, there are numerous organiza-
tions dedicated to dealing with the social question and
having in view, either directly or indirectly, the same
supreme end as the Counter-Revolution: the establishment
of the Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Given this commu-
1. See especially Part I, Chapter 7, 2.
108 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
nity of ends,* it is necessary to study the relations between
the Counter-Revolution and these organizations.
A. Works of Charity, Social Service, Associations of
Employers, Workers, and So Forth
a. To the degree that these works normalize social and
economic life, they are prejudicial to the development of
the revolutionary process. In this sense, they are ipso facto
precious auxiliarics of the Counter-Revolution, even if
only in an implicit and indirect way.
b. Nevertheless, in this respect, it is worthwhile to call
to mind some truths that are unfortunately often obscured
among those who devote themselves selflessly to these
works.
e There is no doubt that such works can alleviate and,
in some cases, eliminate the material necessities that are
the cause of so much unrest among the masses. But the
spirit of the Revolution does not arise primarily from
misery. Its root is moral and therefore religious.’ Accord-
ingly, to the extent their particular nature allows, these
works must promote a religious and moral formation that
gives special emphasis to warning souls of the revolution-
ary virus, which is so powerful in our days.
eHoly Mother Church compassionately encourages
everything that might relieve human miseries. She does
not blind herself to the fact that she cannot eliminate all
of them, and she preaches a holy resignation to sickness,
poverty, and other privations.
e Undoubtedly in these works there are precious oppor-
tunities for creating a climate of understanding and chari-
ty between employers and workers and, consequently, for
demobilizing those who are on the brink of class struggle.
2. See Part HU, Chapter 12, 7.
3. Cf. Leo XII, encyclical Graves de Communi, January 18, 1901, in
Wynne, The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XII, pp. 485-486.
CHAPTER XI 109
But it would be incorrect to suppose that kindness always
disarms human wickedness. Not even the innumerable
benefits conferred by Our Lord during His earthly life
deterred the hatred the wicked had for Him. Thus,
although in the fight against the Revolution one should
preferably guide and enlighten souls in an affable manner,
it is evident that, against its various forms—communism,
for example—a direct and express combat by all just and
legal means is licit and generally even indispensable.
elt is particularly to be observed that these works
should inculcate in their beneficiaries or associates a true
sense of gratitude for the favors received, or, when it is not
a question of favors but of acts of justice, a real apprecia-
tion for the moral uprightness that inspires such acts.
en the preceding paragraphs, we had principally the
worker in mind. It should be pointed out, however, that the
counter-revolutionary does not systematically favor one
social class or another. While highly zealous for the right
of property, he should nevertheless remind the higher
classes that it is not enough for them to fight the
Revolution in the fields in which it attacks their personal
interests, and, paradoxically, to favor it-- as one so often
sees—by word or example in every other terrain, such as
in family life, at the beaches, swimming pools, and other
diversions, in intellectual and artistic pursuits, and so on.
A working class that follows their example and accepts
their revolutionary ideas will inevitably be used by the
Revolution against the “semi-counterrevolutionary” elites.
e An aristocracy and a bourgeoisie that vulgarize their
manners and dress in order to disarm the Revolution harm
themselves. A social authority that degrades itself is com-
parable to the salt that has lost its savor. It is good for noth-
ing save to be cast out and trodden on by men.‘ In most
cases, the scorning multitudes will do just that.
4. Cf. Matt. 5:13.
1 10. PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
e Although maintaining their station in life with digni-
ty and energy, the upper classes should have direct and
benevolent contact with the other classes. Charity and jus-
tice practiced at a distance are inadequate to establish links
of truly Christian love among the social classes.
e Above all, those who own property should remember
that if there are many people willing to prevent commu-
nism from encroaching on the right to private property
(regarded, of course, as an individual right with a function
that is also social), it is because this is desired by God and
intrinsically according to Natural Law. Now, this principle
refers to the property of the worker as much as to that of
the employer. Consequently, the same principle behind the
anticommunist struggle should lead the employer to
respect the right of the worker to a just wage, in keeping
with his own needs and those of his family. It is worth
recalling this in order to emphasize that the Counter-
Revolution is not only the guardian of the property of the
employer but of that of the worker too. Its struggle is not
on behalf of groups or classes, but for principles.
B. The Struggle Against Communism
We will now consider organizations whose main pur-
pose is not the construction of a proper social order but
rather the struggle against communism. For reasons al-
ready expounded in this work, we deem this kind of
organization to be legitimate and often even indispensa-
ble. Of course, in saying this, we are not identifying the
Counter-Revolution with abuses that organizations of this
kind may have committed in one country or another.
Nevertheless, we believe that the counter-revolutionary
efficacy of such organizations can be greatly increased if
their members, while remaining within the sphere of their
specialized activities, keep certain essential truths in mind:
CHAPTER XI ; 111
e Only an intelligent refutation of communism is effi-
cacious. The mere repetition of catch phrases, even when
clever and apt, is insufficient.
e This refutation, when made in cultured circles, must
be aimed at the ultimate doctrinal foundations of commu-
nism. It is important to point out its essential character as
a philosophical sect that deduces from its principles a par-
ticular concept of man, society, the State, history, culture,
and so on, just as the Church deduces from Revelation and
Moral Law all the principles of Catholic civilization and
culture. Accordingly, no conciliation is possible between
communism—a sect that contains the plenitude of the
Revolution—and the Church.
e So-called scientific communism is unknown by the
multitudes, and the doctrine of Marx does not attract the
masses. An ideological anticommunist action among the
general public must be aimed at a very widespread state
of spirit that often makes anticommunists ashamed to
oppose communism. This state of spirit springs from the
more or less conscious idea that all inequality is unjust
and that not only great fortunes but even medium-sized
ones must be eliminated, for if there were no rich there
would be no poor. This reveals vestiges of certain social-
ist schools of thought of the nineteenth century, perfumed
with romantic sentimentalism. It gives rise to a mentality
that claims to be anticommunist but, nevertheless, fre-
quently calls itself socialist.
This mentality, which is becoming more and more
powerful in the West, is a much greater danger than
Marxist indoctrination itself. It leads us slowly down a
slope of concessions that may reach the extreme point
where nations on this side of the Iron Curtain will have
become communist republics. Such concessions, which
show a tendency to economic egalitarianism and state
control, can be noted in every sphere. Private enterprise is
112 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
more and more limited. Inheritance taxes are so onerous
that in certain cases the federal treasury is the principal
heir. Government interference in such things as ex-
change, export, and import makes industry, commerce,
and banking dependent on the State. The State intervenes
in wages, rents, prices, in everything. It has industries,
banks, universities, newspapers, radio stations, television
channels, and more. And while egalitarian statism trans-
forms the economy in this way, immorality and liberalism
are tearing the family apart and paving the way for so-
called free love.
Unless this mentality is specifically fought, the West
will be communist in fifty or one hundred years, even
should a cataclysm engulf Russia and China.
e The right of property is so sacred that, even if a
regime were to give the Church full liberty and even full
support, she could not accept as licit a social organization
m which all property were held collectively.
2. CHRISTENDOM AND THE UNIVERSAL REPUBLIC
While opposing a universal republic, the Counter-
Revolution is also adverse to the unstable and inorganic
situation created by the sundering of Christendom and the
secularization of international life in modern times.
The full sovereignty of each nation does not prevent the
peoples that live within the fold of the Church, gathered
as one huge spiritual family, from constituting bodies
profoundly imbued with the Christian spirit, and possibly
presided over by representatives of the Holy See, to resolve
their differences at the international level. Such bodies
could also favor the cooperation of the Catholic peoples for
the common good in all its aspects, especially with regard
to the defense of the Church against the infidels and the
protection of the freedom of missionaries in pagan lands
CHAPTER XI] 113
or those dominated by communism. Finally, such bodies
could enter into contact with non-Catholic peoples for the
maintenance of good order in international relations.
Without denying the important services that lay bodies
may have rendered on various occasions, the Counter-
Revolution should always call attention to the terrible
shortcoming that lies in their secularism and alert persons
to the risk of these bodies becoming a germ of a universal
republic.>
3. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND NATIONALISM
In this connection, the Counter-Revolution must favor
the maintenance of all sound local characteristics, in what-
ever field, in culture, customs, and so on.
But its nationalism does not consist of the systematic
disparagement of what belongs to others nor the adoration
of national values as if they were extraneous to the great
treasury of Christian civilization.
The grandeur the Counter-Revolution desires for all
countries is and can be only one: Christian grandeur,
which entails the preservation of the values peculiar to
each and a fraternal relationship among them all.
4. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND MILITARISM
The counter-revolutionary must lament armed peace,
hate unjust war, and deplore the arms race of our days.
However, since he is under no illusion that peace will
always reign, he considers the military class a necessity in
this land of exile, and requests that it be shown all the sym-
pathy, gratitude, and admiration rightfully owed to those
whose mission it is to fight and die for the common good.°
5. See Part I, Chapter 7, 3, A, k.
6. See Part I, Chapter 12.
CHAPTER XII
The Church and the
Counter-Revolution
As we have seen, the Revolution was born from an
explosion of disorderly passions that is leading to the total
destruction of temporal society, the complete subversion
of the moral order, and the denial of God. The great target
of the Revolution is, then, the Church, the Mystical Body
of Christ, the infallible teacher of the Truth, the guardian
of Natural Law, and, therefore, the ultimate foundation of
temporal order itself.
Accordingly, we must examine the relation between the
Divine institution that the Revolution wants to destroy and
the Counter-Revolution.
1. THE CuyurcH Is Mucu HIGHER AND Far
BROADER THAN THE REVOLUTION AND
THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
The Revolution and the Counter-Revolution are ex-
tremely important episodes in the history of the Church,
for they constitute the very drama of the apostasy and the
CHAPTER XII 115
conversion of the Christian West. Even so, they are mere
episodes.
The mission of the Church does not lie only in the West,
nor is it bound by time to the length of the revolutionary
process. Amid the storms through which she passes today,
she could proudly and tranquilly say: “Alios ego vidi ven-
tos, alias prospexi animo procellas” (“I have already seen
other winds, | have already weathered other storms”).' The
Church has fought iri other lands, against adversaries from
among other peoples, and she will undoubtedly continue
to face problems and enemies quite different from those of
today until the end of time.
The Church’s objective is to exercise her direct spiritu-
al power and her indirect temporal power for the salvation
of souls. The Revolution is an obstacle that arose to pre-
vent the accomplishment of this mission. For the Church,
the struggle against this specific obstacle (among so many
others) is no more than a means limited to the dimensions
of the obstacle—most important means, of course, but,
nevertheless, only a means. Thus, even if the Revolution
did not exist, the Church would still do everything she
does for the salvation of souls.
We might make the matter clearer if we compare the
position of the Church in face of the Revolution and the
Counter-Revolution with that of a nation at war. When
Hannibal was at the gates of Rome, all the forces of the
Republic had to be marshaled and directed against him.
This was a vital reaction against a most powerful and near-
ly victorious foe. Did it make Rome a mere reaction to
Hannibal? Could anyone believe such a thing?
It would be just as absurd to imagine that the Church is
only the Counter-Revolution.
In this regard, it should be made clear that the Counter-
Revolution is not destined to save the Spouse of Christ.
1. Cicero, Familiares, 12, 25, 5.
116 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Supported as she is on the promise of her Founder, she
does not need men to survive. On the contrary, it is the
Church that gives life to the Counter-Revolution, which,
without her, is neither feasible nor even conceivable.
The Counter-Revolution wants to contribute to the sal-
vation of the many souls threatened by the Revolution and
to the prevention of the catastrophes that menace temporal
society. To do this, it must rely on the Church and humbly
serve her, instcad of vainly imagining that it is saving her.
2. THE CHURCH HAS THE GREATEST INTEREST
IN CRUSHING THE REVOLUTION
If the Revolution does exist, if it is what it is, then the
crushing of the Revolution is within the mission of the
Church, it is in the interest of the salvation of souls, and
it is of special importance for the greater glory of God.
3. THE CHURCH Is A FUNDAMENTALLY
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY FORCE
Considering the term Revolution in the sense employed
herein, the words of this heading are the obvious conclu-
sion to what we have said above. To state the contrary
would be to say that the Church is failing in her mission.
4. THE Caurcu Is THE GREATEST
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY FORCE
The primacy of the Church among counter-revolution-
ary forces is obvious if we consider the number of Catho-
lics, their unity, and their influence in the world. But this
legitimate consideration of natural resources has a very
secondary importance. The real strength of the Church lies
in her being the Mystical Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
CHAPTER XII __ 117
5. THE CHURCH IS THE SOUL OF THE
COUNTER-REVOLUTION
If the Counter-Revolution is the struggle to extinguish
the Revolution and to build the new Christendom, re-
splendent with faith, humble with hicrarchical spirit, and
spotless in purity, clearly this will be achieved, above all,
by a profound action in the hearts of men. This action is
proper to the Church, which teaches Catholic doctrine and
leads men to love and practice it. Therefore, the Church is
the very soul of the Counter-Revolution.
6. THE IDEAL OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Is To EXALT THE CHURCH
This is an evident proposition. If the Revolution is the
opposite of the Church, it is impossible to hate the Revo-
lution (considered in its entirety and not just in some
isolated aspect) and to combat it without ipso facto having
the ideal of exalting the Church.
7. IN A Way, THE PURVIEW OF THE
COUNTER-REVOLUTION IS BROADER
THAN THE ECCLESIASTICAL AMBIT
The foregoing serves to show that the action of the
Counter-Revolution involves a reorganization of all tempo-
ral society. “There is a whole world to be rebuilt from its
very foundations,” said Pius XII at the sight of the ruins
with which the Revolution had covered the whole earth.
Now, while this task of a fundamental counter-revolu-
tionary reorganization of temporal society must, on the one
hand, be wholly inspired by the doctrine of the Church, it
2. Pius XII, exhortation to the faithful of Rome, February 10, 1952,
Discorsi e radiomessagi, vol. 13, p. 471.
118 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
involves, on the other hand, innumerable concrete and
practical aspects that are properly in the civil order. And
in this respect, the Counter-Revolution goes beyond the
ecclesiastical ambit, though always intimately bound to
the Church in every matter that has to do with her Ma-
gisterium and indirect power.
8. WRETHER EVERY CATHOLIC SHOULD BE
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY
In so far as he is an apostle, the Catholic is a counter-
revolutionary. But he can be one in different ways.
A. The Implicit Counter-Revolutionary
He may be one implicitly and, as it were, unconscious-
ly. This is the case of a Sister of Charity at a hospital. Her
direct action is aimed at the cure of bodies and, above all,
the good of souls. She can perform this action without
speaking of the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution.
She may even live in such special conditions that she is
unaware of the phenomenon Revolution and Counter-
Revolution. Nevertheless, to the degree that she really
benefits souls, she will be diminishing the influence of the
Revolution upon them. This is implicitly waging Counter-
Revolution.
B. The Modernity of a Counter-Revolutionary
Explicitness
Given that our times are immersed in the phenomenon
Revolution and Counter-Revolution, it seems to us a con-
dition for wholesome modernity that it be deeply under-
stood and faced up to perspicaciously and energetically as
circumstances dictate.
CHAPTER XII 7 NY
Thus, we believe it is most desirable that all present-
day apostolate, whenever it be the case, have an explicitly
counter-revolutionary intention and tone.
In other words, we believe that—regardless of the field
in which he works—the truly modern apostle will greatly
add to the effectiveness of his labors if he discerns the
Revolution within his field and exerts a corresponding
counter-revolutionary influence in all his actions.
C. The Explicit Counter-Revolutionary
No one may deny that it is licit for certain persons to
take upon themselves the task of developing a specifically
counter-revolutionary apostolate in Catholic and non-
Catholic circles. This they will do by proclaiming the ex-
istence of the Revolution, describing its spirit, method,
and doctrines, and urging everyone to counter-revolution-
ary action.
In so doing, they will be putting their activities at the
service of a specialized apostolate as natural and meritori-
ous as (and certainly more profound than) the apostolate
of those who specialize in the struggle against other ene-
mies of the Church, such as spiritism and Protestantism.
To influence the numerous Catholic and non-Catholic
circles in order to alert souls against, say, the evils of
Protestantism is undoubtedly legitimate, and necessary
for an intelligent and efficacious anti-Protestant action.
The Catholics who devote themselves to the apostolate of
the Counter-Revolution will proceed in an analogous man-
ner.
Possible excesses in this apostolate—which may hap-
pen as in any other—do not invalidate the principle we
established. After all, “abusus non tollit usum” (“abuse
does not abolish use”).
120 PART II, THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION
D. Counter-Revolutionary Action That Does Not
Constitute an Apostolate
Finally, there are counter-revolutionaries who do not
practice an apostolate in the strict sense, for they devote
themselves to the struggle in certain fields such as specifi-
cally partisan politics or economic undertakings to combat
the Revolution. Undoubtedly, these activities are highly
relevant and can only be looked upon with approval.
9, CATHOLIC ACTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
If we employ the expression Catholic Action in the
legitimate sense that Pius XII gave it (that is, a group of
associations that, under the direction of the Hierarchy,
collaborate with its apostolate), then in our view, the
Counter-Revolution in its religious and moral aspects is a
most important part of the program of a soundly modern
Catholic Action.
Naturally, counter-revolutionary action can be pursued
by one individual working alone or by several working
together in a private capacity. With due ecclesiastical
approval, this action can even culminate in the formation
of a religious association especially dedicated to fighting
the Revolution.
Obviously, counter-revolutionary action in the strictly
partisan or economic terrain is not part of the goals of
Catholic Action.
10. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND NON-CATHOLICS
May the Counter-Revolution accept the cooperation of
non-Catholics? Are there counter-revolutionary Protes-
tants, Moslems, and others? The answer must be carefully
nuanced. There is no authentic Counter-Revolution out-
CHAPTER XII 121
side the Church.’ But it is conceivable that certain Prot-
estants or Moslems, for instance, are in a state of soul in
which they begin to perceive all the wickedness of the
Revolution and to take a stand against it. Such persons
can be expected to form obstacles, at times even great
ones, against the Revolution. If they respond to grace,
they can become excellent Catholics and, therefore, effi-
cient counter-revolutionaries. Until then, they at least
oppose the Revolution to some degree and can even force
it back. In the full and true sense of the word, they are not
counter-revolutionaries. But their cooperation may and
even should be accepted, with the care that the directives
of the Church demand.
Catholics ought to be particularly mindful of the dan-
gers inherent in interdenominational associations, as Saint
Pius X wisely warned:
Indeed, without mentioning other points, the dangers
to which—because of associations of this sort our
people expose or certainly can expose both the integrity
of their faith and the just obedience to the laws and pre-
cepts of the Catholic Church are incontestably grave.
Among non-Catholics, our best apostolate should focus
on those who have counter-revolutionary tendencies.
3. See no. 5, above.
4. Saint Pius X, encyclical Singulari quadam, September 24, 1912,
Bonne Presse, Paris, vol. 7, p. 275.
Part Ul
Revolution and
Counter-Revolution
TWENTY YEARS AFTER
In 1976 the author was asked to write a preface to a new
Italian edition of Revolution and Counter-Revolution. He
deemed it better, instead, to present an analysis of the
evolution of the revolutionary process in the nearly
twenty years since the essay’s first edition. He therefore
added this third part, which was first published in 1977.
In 1992, in the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain,
the author updated this analysis with some commentaries
published herein.—Ed.
CHAPTER I
The Revolution: A Process in
Continual Transformation
Since so much time—marked by so many events—has
elapsed since the first edition of Revolution and Counter-
Revolution, one could fittingly ask if there is anything to
be added regarding the matters treated in the essay.
The answer could only be yes, as the reader will see.
1. REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE
TFPs: TWENTY YEARS OF ACTION AND COMBAT
Twenty Years After, the title of a novel by Alexandre
Dumas—so appreciated by Brazilian adolescents until the
moment now long past when profound psychological
transformations destroyed the taste for that kind of litera-
ture—is brought to mind by an association of images as
we begin these notes.
We just looked back to 1959; 1976 is almost over.
Therefore, we are approaching the end of the second
decade of this book’s circulation. Twenty years .. .
126 PART TI, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
In this period, the essay’s editions have multiplied.’
It was not our intention to make Revolution and
Counter-Revolution a mere study. We wrote it also with the
intention of making it a bedside book for about one
hundred young Brazilians who had asked us to orient and
coordinate their efforts in view of the problems and duties
they faced at the time. This initial handful—the seed of
the future TFP—soon spread throughout Brazil, which is
the size of a continent. Propitious circumstances favored,
pari passu, the formation and development of analogous
and autonomous organizations throughout South America.
The same occurred later in the United States, Canada,
Spain, and France. More recently, intellectual affinities and
promising cordial relations began to link this extensive
family of organizations to personalities and associations of
other countries of Europe. In France, the Bureau Tradition,
Famille, Propriété,” founded in 1973, has been fostering the
resulting contacts and approximations as much as possible.
These twenty years, then, were years of expansion.
They were years of expansion, yes, but years of intense
counter-revolutionary struggle as well.
Considerable results have been achieved in this way. As
this is not the moment to enumerate them all,? we limit
1. Besides two initial printings in Catolicismo, Revolution and Counter-
Revolution, in book form, has had two editions in Portuguese, three
editions in Italian, one in German, six in Spanish (two in Spain, one in
Chile, one in Colombia, and two in Argentina), three in French (in
Brazil, Canada, and France), and four in English (Fullerton, Calif., New
Rochelle, N.Y., York and Spring Grove, Penn.). It has also been tran-
scribed in full in the magazines Qué Pasa? (Madrid) and Fiducia
(Santiago, Chile). These editions total over 100,000 copies.—Ed.
2. Now the Association Francaise pour la Défense de la Tradition, de la
Famille et de la Propriété.
3. See the book Um homem, uma obra, uma gesta — Homenagem das
TFPs a Plinio Corréa de Oliveira (S40 Paulo: EdigSes de Amanha,
1989), which includes ample historical data on TFPs and TFP Bureaus
in 22 countries on six continents —Ed.
CHAPTER I 127
ourselves to saying that, in each country where a TFP or
a similar association exists, it has been continuously
combating the Revolution, that is, more particularly, so-
called Catholic leftism in the religious realm and com-
munism in the temporal realm. In the genuine combat
against communism, we include the battle against all
modes of socialism, for these are merely preparatory
stages or larval forms of communism. This combat has
always been waged according to the principles, goals, and
norms of Part II of this study.’
The fruits thus obtained well show the accuracy of what
is said in this work on the inseparable themes of Revo-
lution and Counter-Revolution.
2. IN A WORLD IN CONTINUOUS AND RAPID
TRANSFORMATION, IS REVOLUTION AND
COUNTER-REVOLUTION STILL CURRENT?
THE ANSWER IS AFFIRMATIVE
At the same time that the editions and fruits of Revo-
lution and Counter-Revolution were multiplying on six
continents,” the world—impelled by the revolutionary
process that has been dominating it for four centuries—
underwent such rapid and profound changes that, as we
launch this new edition, it is appropriate to ask, as we
4. Regarding the fight against the more recent forms of socialism, Prof.
Plinio Corréa de Oliveira’s What Does Self-Managing Socialism Mean
for Communism: A Barrier? Or a Bridgehead? deserves special mention.
It was widely published in 1982 (in 50 major Western newspapers and
magazines, with a total of over 33 million copies). This publication
prompted Friedrich A. Hayek, Nobel Prize winner in economics, to write
a letter of high praise. Also of great interest are the books Espajia,
anestesiada sin percibirlo, amordazada sin saberlo, extraviada sin que-
rerlo: la obra del PSOE and Ad perpetuam rei memoriam, published by
the Spanish TFP in 1988 and 1991 respectively—Ed.
5. Revolution and Counter-Revolution has also had significant circula-
tion in Australia, South Africa, and the Philippines —Ed.
128 7 PART It], TWENTY YEARS AFTER
have already said, whether on account of these changes
something should be rectified or added in regard to what
we wrote in 1959.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution is situated some-
times in the theoretical field and sometimes in a theoretic-
practical field very close to pure theory. Thus, it should not
surprise anyone if in our judgment no event has altered the
study’s content.
Assuredly, many of the methods and styles of action
used by the Brazilian TFP, which was being formed in
1959—and by its sister organizations—were replaced or
adapted to the new circumstances. Others were intro-
duced. However, as all these methods and styles are
situated in an inferior field that is effectual and practical,
Revolution and Counter-Revolution does not address
them. Accordingly, nothing in the text needs to be modi-
fied.
All this notwithstanding, there would be much to add
if we wished to relate Revolution and Counter-Revolution
to the new horizons that history is opening. But this would
not fit in a simple supplement. We do think, though, that
a summary of what the Revolution did in these twenty
years—a review of the world scene as transformed by
it—could help the reader to easily and conveniently relate
the study’s contents to present reality. This we shall
proceed to do.
CHAPTER II
The Apogee and Crisis
of the Third Revolution
1. THE APOGEE OF THE THIRD REVOLUTION
As we have seen,' three great revolutions constituted
the chief stages of the process to gradually demolish the
Church and Christian civilization: in the sixteenth century,
humanism, the Renaissance, and Protestantism (First Re-
volution); in the eighteenth century, the French Revolution
(Second Revolution); and in the second decade of this cen-
tury, Communism (Third Revolution).
These three revolutions can only be understood as parts
of an immense whole that is the Revolution.
Since the Revolution is a process, it is obvious that,
from 1917 to the present, the Third Revolution has contin-
ued its course. It is now at a true apogee.
When we consider the territories and populations sub-
ject to communist regimes, we see that the Third Revolu-
tion holds sway over a world empire without precedent in
history. This empire is a continuous cause of insecurity
1. See Introduction and Part I, Chapter 3, 5, A-D.
130 PART II, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
and disunion among the greatest noncommunist nations.
Moreover, the leaders of the Third Revolution control the
strings that move, throughout the noncommunist world,
the openly communist parties and the immense network
of cryptocommunists, paracommunists, and useful idiots
infiltrated not only into the noncommunist, socialist, and
other parties, but also into the churches,’ professional and
cultural associations, banks, the press, television, radio,
the movie industry, and the like. And as if this were not
enough, the Third Revolution applies with devastating
efficacy—as we shall subsequently explain—the tactics
of psychological conquest. With these tactics, commu-
nism is succeeding in reducing immense segments of the
noncommunist Western public opinion to a foolish apa-
thy. Such tactics enable the Third Revolution to expect, in
this terrain, yet more remarkable successes that are even
more disconcerting to observers who analyze events from
outside the Third Revolution.
COMMENTARY
Crisis in the Third Revolution: An
Inevitable Fruit of the Marxist Utopias
The international dimensions of the Third Revolu-
tion’s apogee was already notorious, as the text notes.
With the passing of time, the general picture of this
apogee became even clearer, whether on account of
2. We speak of the infiltration of communism into the various churches.
It is indispensable to register that this infiltration is a supreme danger to
the world, specifically in so far as it is carried on in the Holy Roman
Catholic and Apostolic Church. The reason for this is that she is not
merely a species of the genus churches. She is the only living and true
Church of the living and true God, the only Mystical Spouse of Our Lord
Jesus Christ. In relation to the other churches, she is not a greater and
more brilliant diamond among smaller and less brilliant ones: She is the
only true diamond among “similars” made of glass.
CHAPTER II 131
the geographical and populational expansion of com-
munist domination, the worldwide diffusion of Red
propaganda and the weight of the communist parties
in the Western world, or the penetration of communist
tendencies into national cultures.
These factors—heightened by a global panic of the
atomic threat that Soviet aggressiveness posed to all
continents—led to a policy of almost universal soft-
ness and capitulation in relation to Moscow: the
German and Vatican Ostpolitiken, the sweeping
wind of unconditional pacifism, the proliferation of
political slogans and formulas that prepared so many
bourgeois to view the triumph of communism as
inevitable in the near future.
Have we not all lived under the psychological
pressure of this leftist optimism, which was enig-
matic as a sphinx for the indolent centrists and threat-
ening as a leviathan for those—like the TFPs and
followers of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in so
many countries—who well discerned the “apoca-
lypse” to which this was leading?
How few then were those who perceived that this
leviathan was afflicted by a worsening crisis it could
not overcome since it was an inevitable fruit of
Marxist utopias!
This crisis now seems to have disintegrated the
leviathan. But, as will be seen further on, this disin-
tegration has spread an even more deadly climate of
crisis throughout the world.
The inertia—when not the overt and substantial col-
laboration—of so many “democratic” governments and
crafty private economic powers of the West in face of
communism (already so powerful) paints a dreadful
global panorama.
132 PART IL, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
Under these conditions, should the course of the revo-
lutionary process continue as it has heretofore, it is hu-
manly inevitable that the general triumph of the Third
Revolution will ultimately impose itself on the whole
world. How soon? Many would be alarmed if, as a mere
hypothesis, we were to suggest twenty years. To them, this
period would seem surprisingly brief. In reality, who can
guarantee that this outcome will not take place within ten
years, five years, or even less?
The proximity, indeed the eventual imminence, of this
utter devastation is indubitably one of the notes that in-
dicate the greatest change in the world conjuncture when
we contrast the horizons of 1959 and 1976.
A. On the Road to Its Apogee, the Third Revolution
Studiously Avoided Total and Useless Adventures
Even though the mentors of the Third Revolution have
the capacity to launch themselves at any moment in an
adventure for the complete conquest of the world by a
series of wars, political blows, economic crises, and
bloody revolutions, clearly such an adventure presents
considerable risks. The mentors of the Third Revolution
will accept running these risks only if it seems indispen-
sable to them.
In effect, if continuous use of classic methods carried
communism to the pinnacles of power without exposing
the revolutionary process to risks not carefully circum-
scribed and calculated, it is understandable that those who
guide the universal Revolution hope to attain total world
domination without exposing their work to the risk of
irreparable catastrophes, inherent to every great adven-
ture.
CHAPTER 133
B. Adventure in This Revolution’s Next Stages?
The success of the usual methods of the Third Revolu-
tion is endangered by the rise of unfavorable psychologi-
cal circumstances that have become strongly accentuated
over the last twenty years.
Will such circumstances compel communism to choose
adventure henceforth?
COMMENTARY
Perestroika and Glasnost: Dismantling the
Third Revolution or Metamorphosing
Communism?
At the end of 1989, the highest directors of inter-
national communism decided the moment had finally
arrived to initiate communism’s greatest political
maneuver.
This maneuver would consist in demolishing the
Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. Its effects would
coincide with the implementation of the “liberalizing”
programs of glasnost (1985) and perestroika (1986)
so as to precipitate the apparent dismantling of the
Third Revolution in the Soviet world.
In turn, this dismantling would gain for its chief
promoter and executor, Mikhail Gorbachev, the em-
phatic sympathy and unreserved confidence of West-
ern governments and of numerous private economic
powers of the West.
From these, the Kremlin could expect a massive
inflow of financial resources for its empty coffers.
The ample fulfillment of this expectation enabled
Gorbachev and crew to continue floating, tiller in
hand, on a sea of misery, indolence, and inaction that
the unhappy Russian populace, until recently sub-
134 PART III, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
a OSES
jected to complete state capitalism, continues to face
with disconcerting passivity. This passivity is propi-
tious to the generalization of moral apathy and chaos
and perhaps to the formation of an internal contentious
crisis that could degenerate into a civil or world war?
Such was the setting when the sensational and hazy
events of August 1991 broke out, with Gorbachev,
Yeltsin, and others as protagonists in this game that
paved the way first for the transformation of the
U.S.S.R. into a loose confederation of states and after-
wards for its dissolution.
There is talk of the prospective fall of Fidel Castro’s
regime in Cuba and the possible invasion of Western
Europe by hordes of famished people from the East
and the Maghreb. The several attempts made by mul-
titudes of needy Albanians to enter Italy could have
been a heralding of this new “barbarian invasion.”
In the Iberian Peninsula, as in other parts of Eu-
rope, there are some who associate these hypotheses
with the effects of the presence of multitudes of Mo-
hammedans casually admitted in previous years at
several points of the continent and with construction
projects for a bridge over the strait of Gibraltar, which
would facilitate further Moslem invasions of Europe.
There would be a curious similarity of effects
between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the building
of this bridge: Both would open the European conti-
nent to invasions analogous to those Charlemagne
victoriously repelled, namely, the barbarian or semi-
3. In February of 1990, the author released a manifesto titled “Com-
munism and Anticommunism on the Threshold of the Millennium’s Last
Decade.” An carnest questioning of communist leaders in both East and
West regarding perestroika, it was published in 21 newspapers of 8
countries and had wide repercussions, especially in Italy.— Ed.
CHAPTER II 135
barbarian hordes from the East and the Mohammedan
hordes from regions south of the European continent.
One would say that the pre-medieval scenario is
repeated.
Yet, something is missing; the ardor of springtime
faith among the Catholic populations called to con-
front both impacts simultaneously. Above all, some-
one is lacking: Where can one find today a man on par
with Charlemagne?
Were we to imagine the development of these
hypotheses in the West, the magnitude and drama of
their consequences would certainly astound us—even
though our overview does not encompass all the con-
sequences being predicted by experts from different
intellectual circles and by objective media.
For example, there is a growing opposition between
consumer countries and poor countries, that is, be-
tween rich industrialized nations and nations that are
mere producers of raw materials.
This opposition is expected to result in a world-
wide clash between two sets of ideologies: one in
favor of unlimited enrichment; the other, of “misera-
bilist” subconsumerism.
This eventual clash inevitably brings to mind the
class struggle proclaimed by Marx.
Therefore we ask: Will this struggle be a projec-
tion, on a world scale, of a clash analogous to the one
Marx envisioned primarily as a socioeconomic phe-
nomenon within nations, a struggle that will involve
every nation according to its own characteristics?
If this happens, will the struggle between the First
and Third Worlds become a disguise by which a meta-
morphosed Marxism, shamed by its catastrophic
socioeconomic failure, tries, with renewed chances of
success, to attain the final victory, a victory that, so
136 PART II, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
far, has eluded Gorbachev, who though certainly not
the doctor is at least the bard and prestidigitator of
perestroika?
Yes, of perestroika, which is undoubtedly a refine-
ment of communism, as confessed by its author in his
propagandistic essay Perestroika: New Thinking for
Our Country and the World:
“The aim of this reform is to ensure . . . the transi-
tion from an excessively centralized management
system relying on orders, to a democratic one, based
on a combination of democratic centralism and self-
management.”*
And what is this self-management if not “the su-
preme objective of the Soviet state,” as established in
the Preamble to the Constitution of the former
U.S.S.R.?
2. UNANTICIPATED OBSTACLES TO THE THIRD
REVOLUTION’S USE oF CLASSIC METHODS
A. The Decline of Persuasive Power
Let us examine the circumstances that may force com-
munism to choose the path of adventure.
The first is the decline of the persuasive power of
communist proselytism.
There was a time when explicit and categorical indoc-
trination was international communism’s principal re-
cruiting method.
For reasons too extensive to enumerate, conditions
have become considerably adverse to such indoctrination
in almost all the West and in vast segments of public opin-
4. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and
the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 34.
CHAPTER II 137
ion. Communism’s dialectics and its full and open doctri-
nal propaganda have visibly declined in persuasive power.
This explains why in our days communist propaganda
is carried out in an increasingly disguised, mild, and
gradual way.
Its disguise is effected cither by spreading sparse and
veiled Marxist principles through socialist literature, or by
instilling in the culture of the establishment itself certain
principles that, like seeds, later bear fruit, leading centrists
to an inadvertent and gradual acceptance of the communist
doctrine in its entirety.
B. The Decline in the Capacity of Leadership
This decrease in the Red creed’s direct persuasive power
over the multitudes—which the recourse to these indirect,
slow, and laborious methods denotes—is accompanied by a
correlative decline in communism’s leadership capacity.
Let us examine how these correlative phenomena are
manifested and what their fruits are.
— Hatred, Class Struggle, Revolution
Essentially, the communist movement is and considers
itself to be a revolution born of class hatred. Violence is
the method most consistent with it. This is the direct and
fulminating method, from which the mentors of commu-
nism expected the greatest results with the least risk in the
shortest possible time.
This method presupposes a leadership capacity in the
communist parties. In the past, this capacity enabled them
to create discontent, transform it into hatred, articulate this
hatred in an immense conspiracy, and thus succeed, with
the “atomic” force of this hatred’s impetus, in destroying
the present order and implanting communism.
‘138 PART III, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
— The Decline in Guidance of Hatred and in Use
of Violence
But the capacity to guide hatred is also slipping from
the hands of the communists.
We will not extend this writing by going into an expla-
nation of the complex causes of this fact. We limit our-
selves to observing that violence resulted in fewer and
fewer advantages for the communists during these twenty
years. To prove this, we need only recall the invariable
failure of the guerrilla warfare and terrorism spread
throughout Latin America.
It is quite truc that violence has been dragging virtually
all of Africa toward communism. But this says very little
about the tendencies of public opinion in the rest of the
world. The primitivism of most of Africa’s aboriginal
populations places them in special and unequivocal con-
ditions. The growth of violence there has been due not so
much to ideological motives as to anti-colonialist resent-
ments, which communist propaganda exploited with its
customary astuteness.
— The Fruit and Proof of This Decline: The Third
Revolution Metamorphoses Into a Smiling Revolution
The clearest proof that over the last twenty or thirty
years the Third Revolution has been losing its capacity to
create and direct the revolutionary hatred lies in its self-
imposed metamorphosis.
During the post-Stalinist thaw with the West, the Third
Revolution donned a smiling mask, exchanged polemics
for dialogue, pretended to be changing its mentality and
attitude, and welcomed all sorts of collaboration with the
adversaries it had tried to crush through violence.
In the international sphere, the Revolution thus succes-
CHAPTER II ; 139
sively passed from the Cold War to peaceful coexistence,
then to the “dropping of ideological barriers,” and finally
to frank collaboration with the capitalist powers, labeled,
in the language of publicity, “Ostpolitik” or “détente.”
In the internal sphere of the various Western countries,
the politique de la main tendue (policy of the extended
hand), which had been a mere artifice for deceiving a
small minority of leftist Catholics during the Stalin era,
became a true détente between communists and procapi-
talists. It was an ideal way for the Reds to initiate cordial
relations and fraudulent approximations with all their
adversaries, whether religious or temporal.
Out of this came a series of “friendly” tactics: the fel-
low travelers, the legalistic “Eurocommunism”’ (affable,
and cautious toward Moscow), the “historic compromise,”
and the like.
As we have said, these stratagems provide advantages
for the Third Revolution today. But they are slow, gradual,
and dependent on a myriad of variables for their fruition.
At the height of its power, the Third Revolution ceased
to threaten and attack and began to smile and request. It
ceased advancing in military cadence, shod in cossack
boots, in order to progress slowly at a discreet pace. It
abandoned the straight path—the shoricst—and chose a
zigzag path marked with uncertainty.
What an enormous change in twenty years!
C. Objection: The Communist Successes
in Italy and France
But, someone will object, the successes of these tactics
in Italy and France do not permit one to affirm that commu-
nism is retreating in the free world, or even that the smil-
ing communism of today is progressing more slowly than
the scowling communism of the Lenin and Stalin years.
140 PART III, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
First of all, in answer to this, one must say that the
general elections in Sweden, West Germany, and Finland,
as well as the regional elections and the present instability
of the Labor Government in Great Britain, attest to the
inappetence of the great masses for socialist “paradises,”
communist violence, and so on.’ There are expressive
signs that the example of these countries has already
begun to reverberate in those two great Catholic Latin
nations of Western Europe, thus hindering the communist
advance.
But, in our opinion, it is necessary above all to question
how authentically communist is the growing number of
votes obtained by the Italian Communist party or the
French Socialist party (of which we speak since the
French Communist party is stagnant). Both parties are far
from having benefited only from the votes of their own
electorates. Certainly considerable Catholic support—
5. This vast anti-socialist saturation in Western Europe, although fun-
damentally a reinvigoration of the center and not of the right, is of indis-
putable importance in the fight between the Revolution and the Counter-
Revolution. For, to the extent that European socialism senses it is losing
its rank and file, its leaders will have to display a distancing from and
even a wariness of communism. In turn, the centrist currents, in order
not to be taken for socialists by their own electorates, will have to mani-
fest an even more accentuated anticommunist position, And the right
wing of the centrist partics will have to declare itself to be even mili-
tantly anti-socialist.
In other words, the leftist and centrist currents in favor of collabo-
rating with communism will suffer what occurs to a train when the
locomotive is suddenly braked. The car immediately behind it is hit with
the shock and is pushed in a direction opposite the one it was traveling.
In turn, this car transmits the shock to the second car with an analogous
effect, and so on, down to the last car.
Could this present accentuating of the anti-socialist allergy be the
first manifestation of a profound phenomenon destined to durably
impoverish the revolutionary process? Or is it a mere ambiguous and
passing spasm of common sense amid the contemporary chaos? What
has occurred thus far does not yet provide grounds for an answer.
CHAPTER II . M4
whose real amplitude only history will one day reveal in
its full extent—has created entirely exceptional illusions,
weaknesses, apathies, and complicities around the Italian
Communist party. The electoral projection of these
shocking and artificial circumstances explains, in large
measure, the growth in the number of people voting for
the Communist party, many of whom are by no means
communist voters. Nor should we forget the direct or
indirect influence of certain Croesuses upon the voting.
Their frankly collaborationist attitude toward commu-
nism allows electoral maneuvers from which the Third
Revolution draws an obvious profit. Analogous observa-
tions can be made in regard to the French Socialist party.
3. METAMORPHOSED HATRED AND VIOLENCE
GENERATE TOTAL REVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
To grasp more clearly the scope of these immense
changes in the communist panorama, it is necessary to
analyze, as a whole, communism’s great present-day hope,
namely, revolutionary psychological warfare.
As we have already said, international communism—
though necessarily born of hatred and turned by its own
internal logic to the use of violence exercised by means of
wars, revolutions, and assassinations—was compelled by
great, profound changes in public opinion to dissimulate
its rancor and to pretend it had desisted from these means.
Now, if such desistance were sincere, international
communism would have denied itself to the point of
self-destruction.
But this is far from being the case. Communism uses the
smile only as a weapon of aggression and warfare. It does
not eliminate violence but transfers it from the field of
physical and palpable operations to the field of impalpable
142 PART III], TWENTY YEARS AFTER
psychological actuations. Its objective: to gradually and
invisibly obtain the victory in the interior of souls that it
could not win through drastic and visible means, according
to the classic methods, because of certain circumstances.
Of course, this is not a question of carrying out a few
sparse and sporadic operations in the realm of the spirit.
On the contrary, it is a question of a true war of conquest—
psychological, yes, but total—targeting the whole man and
all men in all countries.
COMMENTARY
Revolutionary Psychological Warfare: The
Cultural Revolution and the Revolution in
the Tendencies
With the Sorbonne student rebellion in May 1968,
numerous socialist and Marxist authors generally
came to recognize the need for a form of revolution
that would prepare the way for political and socio-
economic changes by influencing everyday life, cus-
toms, mentalities, and ways of living. This modality
of revolutionary psychological warfare is known as
the cultural revolution.
According to these authors, only this preponder-
antly psychological and tendential revolution could
change the public’s mentality to the point that would
permit implementing the egalitarian utopia. Without
this mental change, no structural change could last.
This concept of cultural revolution encompasses
what the 1959 edition of Revolution and Counter-
Revolution termed the “Revolution in the tendencies.”®
6. Part I, Chapter 5.
CHAPTER II 143
We insist on this concept of total revolutionary psycho-
logical warfare.
In fact, psychological warfare targets the whole psyche
of man. That is, it acts on him in the various powers of the
soul and in every fiber of his mentality.
It targets all men: partisans or sympathizers of the Third
Revolution as well as neutrals and even adversaries.
It uses any means. At each step it needs to have at its
disposal a specific factor to lead each social group and
even each man imperceptibly closer to communism, how-
ever slightly. And this is so in every area: in religious,
political, social, and economic convictions; in cultural
attitudes; in artistic preferences; and in the ways of being
and acting in the family, in the workplace, and in society.
A. The Two Great Goals of Revolutionary
Psychological Warfare
Given the Third Revolution’s present difficulties in car-
rying out ideological recruitment, the most useful of its
activities is aimed not at its friends and sympathizers, but
at the neutrals and its adversaries:
a. to deceive and slowly put the neutrals to sleep;
b. to divide at every step, disarticulate, isolate, terror-
ize, defame, persecute, and block its adversaries.
These are, in our view, the two great goals of revolu-
tionary psychological warfare.
In this way, the Third Revolution becomes capable of
winning—not so much by increasing the number of its
friends as by destroying its adversaries.
Obviously, to carry on this warfare, communism mobi-
lizes all the means of action it possesses in Western coun-
tries as a result of the apogee attained there by the Third
Revolution’s offensive.
144 PART IH, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
B. Total Revolutionary Psychological Warfare:
A Result of the Third Revolution’s Apogee
and Current Problems
Total revolutionary psychological warfare therefore
results from a combination of the two contradictory fac-
tors previously described: on the one hand, communism’s
peak of influence over almost all key poimts of the great
machine that is Western society; on the other, its dimin-
ishing ability to persuade and lead the profound levels of
Western public opinion.
4, THE THIRD REVOLUTION’S PSYCHOLOGICAL
OFFENSIVE WITHIN THE CHURCH
It would be impossible to describe this psychological
warfare without carefully examining its development in
what is the very soul of the West, that is, Christianity, and
more precisely the Catholic religion, which is Christianity
in its absolute fullness and unique authenticity.
A. The Second Vatican Council
Within the perspective of Revolution and Counter-
Revolution, the greatest success attained by the smiling
post-Stalinist communism was the Second Vatican Coun-
cil’s enigmatic, disconcerting, incredible, and apocalypti-
cally tragic silence about communism.
It was the desire of this Council to be pastoral and not
dogmatic. And, in fact, it did not have a dogmatic scope.
But its omission regarding communism might make it go
down in history as the apastoral Council.
We shall explain the special sense in which we make
this statement.
Imagine an immense flock languishing in poor, arid
CHAPTER IT 145
fields and being attacked on all sides by swarms of bees
and wasps and birds of prey. The shepherds begin to irri-
gate the fields and drive away the swarms and birds. Can
this activity be termed pastoral? In theory, certainly.
However, if at the same time the flock were under
attack by packs of voracious wolves, many of them cov-
ered with sheepskins, and the pastors fought against the
insects and birds without making any effort to unmask or
drive away the wolves, could their work be considered
pastoral, proper to good and faithful shepherds?
In other words, did those in the Second Vatican Council
who wished to scare away the lesser adversaries but gave
free rein-—by their silence—to the greater adversary act as
true pastors?
Using “aggiornate” tactics (about which the least that
can be said is that they are contestable in theory and prov-
ing ruinous in practice), the Second Vatican Council tried
to scare away, let us say, bees, wasps, and birds of prey.
But its silence about communism left full liberty to the
wolves. The work of this Council cannot be inscribed as
effectively pastoral either in history or in the Book of
Life.
It is painful to say this. But, in this sense, the evidence
singles out the Second Vatican Council as one of the
greatest calamities, if not the greatest, in the history of the
Church. From the Council on, the “smoke of Satan’” pene-
trated the Church in unbelievable proportions. And this
smoke is spreading day by day, with the terrible force of
gases in expansion. To the scandal of uncountable souls,
the Mystical Body of Christ entered a sinister process of
self-destruction, as it were.
7. Cf. sermon of Paul VI on June 29, 1972.
146 PART IIL, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
COMMENTARY
Astonishing Calamities in the Church’s
Post-Conciliar Phase
The historic declaration of Paul VI in the allocu-
tion Resistite fortes in fide, of June 29, 1972, is
fundamental for a better understanding of the calami-
ties in the post-Conciliar phase of the Church. We
quote the Poliglotta Vaticana.
Referring to the situation of the Church today,
the Holy Father affirmed that he had the feeling
that “the smoke of Satan has entered into the tem-
ple of God through some crack.” There is doubt,
uncertainty, complexity, restlessness, dissatisfac-
tion, confrontation. People no longer trust the
Church; they trust the first secular profane prophet
who speaks to us through some newspaper or
social movement, running after him and asking
him if he has the formula of true life. We do not
realize that we are already owners and masters of
it. Doubt has entered our consciences through win-
dows that ought to be open to the light... . This
state of uncertainty also reigns in the Church. It
was thought that after the Council the history of
the Church would enter a sunny day. It entered
instead a cloudy, stormy, dark, skeptical, and
uncertain day. We preach ecumenism and yet we
ourselves are farther and farther apart. We seek to
dig abysses instead of filling them.
How did this happen? The Pope confided one of
his opinions: An adverse power has intervened.
His name is the devil, the mysterious being to
which Saint Peter also alludes in his Epistle.’
8. Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, vol. 10, pp. 707-709.
CHAPTER II : 147
The same Pontiff, in an allocution to the students
of the Pontifical Lombard Seminary on December 7,
1968, had affirmed:
The Church finds herself in.an hour of disquiet,
of self-criticism, one might even say of self-
destruction. It is like an acute and complex interior
upheaval, which no one expected after the Council.
One thought of a blossoming, a serene expansion
of the mature concepts of the Council. The Church
still has this aspect of blossoming. But since “bo-
num ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defec-
tu,” the aspect of sorrow has become most notable.
The Church is also being wounded by those who
are part of her.’
His Holiness John Paul II also painted a somber
picture of the Church’s situation.
One must be realistic and acknowledge with a
deep and pained sentiment that a great part of to-
day’s Christians feel lost, confused, perplexed, and
even disillusioned: ideas contradicting the revealed
and unchanging Truth have been spread far and
wide; outright heresies in the dogmatic and moral
fields have been disseminated, creating doubt, con-
fusion, and rebellion; even the liturgy has been
altered. Immersed in intellectual and moral “rela-
tivism” and therefore in permissiveness, Christians
are tempted by athcism, agnosticism, a vaguely
moralistic illuminism, a sociological Christianity,
without defined dogmas and without objective
morality.'°
9. Tbid., vol. 6, p. 188.
10. John Paul II, allocution to the religious and priests participating in
the First Italian National Congress on Missions to the People for the 80s,
February 6, 1981, L’Osservatore Romano, February 7, 1981.
148 PART II, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
In a similar vein, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pre-
fect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
later stated:
Results since the Council seem to be in cruel con-
trast to the expectations of all, beginning with those
of John XXIII and Paul VI.... The Popes and the
Council Fathers were expecting a new Catholic
unity, and instead one has encountered a dissension
that—to use the words of Paul VI—seems to have
gone from self-criticism to self-destruction. A new
enthusiasm was expected, but too often there has
been boredom and discouragement instead. A new
Icap forward was expected, but instead we find our-
selves facing a process of progressive decadence. .
.. It must be clearly stated that a real reform of the
Church presupposes an unequivocal turning away
from the erroneous paths that led to indisputably
negative consequences.”!
History narrates the innumerable dramas the Church
has suffered in the twenty centuries of her cxistence: oppo-
sitions that germinated outside her and tried to destroy her
from outside; malignancies that formed within her, were
cut off by her, and thereafter ferociously tried to destroy
her from outside.
When, however, has history witnessed an attempted
demolition of the Church like the present one? No longer
undertaken by an adversary, it was termed a “self-destruc-
tion” in a most lofty pronouncement having worldwide
repercussion.””
From this resulted an immense debacle for the Church
11. From Vittorio Messori, Vittorio Messori a colloquio con il cardinale
Joseph Ratzinger — Rapporto sulla fede (Milan: Edizioni Paoline, 1985),
pp. 27-28.
12. Allocution of Paul VI to the Lombard Seminary, December 7, 1968.
CHAPTER II 149
and what still remains of Christian civilization. The Os?-
politik of the Vatican, for example, and the massive
infiltration of communism into Catholic circles are ef-
fects of all these calamities. And they constitute addi-
tional successes of the psychological offensive of the
Third Revolution against the Church.
COMMENTARY
The Vatican Ostpolitik
On reading these lines about Ostpolitik, someone
could ask if the enormous changes that took place in
Russia resulted from an ingenious move by the eccle-
siastical hierarchy.
Perhaps the Vatican, on the basis of the best infor-
mation, foresaw that communism, corroded by inter-
nal crises, would begin in its tum to self-destruct.
And to encourage the world headquarters of materi-
alistic atheism to this autodemolition, the Catholic
Church, situated on the other extreme of the ideologi-
cal spectrum, feigned her own destruction. Perhaps
this is what led communism to markedly diminish its
persecution of the Church. After all, if both were
moribund, an arrangement would be understandable.
In other words, it is to the flexibility of the Church
that we should attribute the conditions for the flexi-
bility of the communist world.
It would be fitting to reply that if the members of
the Sacred Hierarchy knew that indigence and ruin
would force communism to self-destruct, they should
have denounced the misery and convoked all the peo-
ples of the West to prepare the way for rehabilitating
Russia and the world as soon as communism effec-
tively collapsed.
150 PART III, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
They should not have remained silent, letting the
phenomenon evolve without benefiting from Catholic
influence and the generous and solicitous cooperation
of Western governments, since only this denunciation
could have prevented the Soviet collapse from reach-
ing its present dead end, wherein everything is misery
and imbroglio.
In any case, it is false to say that the self-destruc-
tion of the Church has hastened the self-destruction of
communism—unless there were a secret treaty be-
tween the two in this regard.
But such a treaty—or suicidal pact—would lack
any legitimacy and usefulness for the Catholic world,
not to mention everything in this mere hypothesis of
offense to the popes in whose pontificates this double
euthanasia was supposedly arranged.
B. The Church: Today’s Center of Conflict Between
the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution
In 1959, the year we wrote Revolution and Counter-
Revolution, the Church was considered the great spiritual
force against the worldwide expansion of the communist
sect.
In 1976, innumerable ecclesiastics, including bishops,
figure as accomplices by omission, as collaborators, and
even as driving forces of the Third Revolution. Progres-
sivism, installed almost everywhere, is converting the
formerly verdant forest of the Catholic Church into wood
that can casily be set afire by communism.
In a word, the extent of this change is such that we do
not hesitate to affirm that the center—the most sensitive
and truly decisive point in the fight between the Revo-
CHAPTER II 15]
lution and the Counter-Revolution—has shifted from the
temporal to the spiritual society.
The Holy Church is now this center. In her, progres-
sivists, cryptocommunists, and procommunists confront
antiprogressivists and anticommunists."
C. Reactions Based on Revolution and
Counter-Revolution
Has the efficacy of Revolution and Counter-Revolution
been annulled by these numerous changes? On the con-
trary.
In 1968, the TFPs then existing in South America,
inspired in particular by Part II of this essay (“The
Counter-Revolution”), organized national petition drives
addressed to Paul VI, requesting measures against leftist
infiltration into the Catholic clergy and laity of South
America.
Altogether, 2,060,368 people in Brazil, Argentina,
Chile, and Uruguay signed the petition in a 58-day period.
13. Since the 1930s, with the group that later founded the Brazilian TFP,
we have been employing the best of our time and possibilities of action
and combat in the battles leading up to the great battle inside the Church.
Our first extensive undertaking in this struggle was the publication of the
book Em Defesa da Acdo Catdélica (Sao Paulo: Editora Ave Maria, 1943),
denouncing the resurgence of modemist errors in Brazil’s Catholic Action
movement. It is also fitting to mention our much more recent study A Jgreja
ante a escalada da ameaga communista — Apelo aos Bispos silenciosos
(Sao Paulo: Editora Vera Cruz, 1976), pp. 37-53.
Today, after more than forty years, the struggle is at its height, permit-
ting one to foresee developments of an amplitude and intensity difficult
to measure. In this struggle we are gladdened by the presence in the
ranks of the TFPs and like organizations of so many new brothers-in-
ideal, in over twenty countries on six continents. It is legitimate also on
the battlefield for the soldiers of the good to say to one another: “Ouam
bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum” (“Behold how good
it is and how pleasant where brethren dwell together in unity”) (Psalm
132:1).
152 ; PART II, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
To our knowledge, it is the only mass petition—on any
subject—signed by the sons of four South American
nations. And, as far as we know, it is the largest petition in
the history of these four countries."
The answer of Paul VI was not merely silence and
inaction. It was—how it pains us to say it—a series of acts
whose effect continues to give prestige and facility of
action to many promoters of Catholic leftism today.
At the sight of this rising tide of communist infiltration
into the Holy Church, the TFPs and like organizations did
not become discouraged. And in 1974 each of them
published a declaration’ expressing their inconformity
with the Vatican Ostpolitik and their resolve “to resist to
the face.’
One of the declaration’s passages, referring to Paul VI,
expresses the document’s spirit:
On our knees, gazing with veneration at the person of
His Holiness Pope Paul VI, we express all our fidelity
to him. In this filial act we say to the Pastor of Pastors:
“Our soul is Yours, our life is Yours. Order us to do
whatever you wish. Only do not order us to cross our
arms in face of the assailing Red wolf. To this our
conscience is opposed.”
Not stopping at these efforts, the TFPs and like organi-
zations in their respective countries promoted during the
14. In 1990 the TFPs surpassed this record with the largest petition
drive in history. They gathered 5,212,580 signatures for the liberation of
Lithuania, then under the Soviet yoke.
15. Titled “The Vatican Policy of Distention Toward the Communist
Governments — The Question for the TFP: To Take No Stand? Or To
Resist?,” this declaration, a veritable manifesto, was published, beginning
in April 1974, in 57 newspapers in 11] countries —Rd.
16. Gal. 2:11.
CHAPTER II 153
course of 1976 nine editions of the Chilean TFP best-
seller, The Church of Silence in Chile: The TFP Proclaims
the Whole Truth."
In almost all countries, the respective edition included
a prologue describing numerous and impressive national
events analogous to what had occurred in Chile.
The response of the public to this great publicity effort
can be termed a victory: 56,000 copics were printed in
South America alone, where, in the most populous coun-
tries, the total pressrun of a book of this nature, when
successful, is usually 5,000 copies.
In Spain, more than 1,000 secular and regular priests
from all regions of the country signed a petition giving
Sociedad Cultural Covadonga" their firm support for the
courageous prologue of the book’s Spanish edition.
D. The Usefulness of the Action of the TFPs and
Like Organizations Inspired by Revolution
and Counter-Revolution
In this specific battlefield, what has been the practical
effect of the counter-revolutionary activity of the TFPs,
inspired by Revolution and Counter-Revolution?
By denouncing the danger of communist infiltration to
Catholic opinion, the TFPs have opened the eyes of Cath-
17. This work—monumental for its documentation, its argumentation,
and the theses it defends—had a truly epic forerunner even before the
installation of communism in Chile, namely, Fabio Vidigal Xavier da
Silveira’s Frei: El Kerensky Chileno. It denounced the decisive collabo-
ration of the Chilean Christian Democratic party and its leader Eduardo
Frei, then president of the country, in paving the way for the Marxist
victory. Published in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Italy, and
Venezuela, the book went through seventeen printings, with more than
100,000 copies.
18. Later called the Spanish TFP: Sociedad Espafiola de Defensa de la
Tradicion, Familia y Propiedad——TFP Covadonga.
154 PART III, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
olics to the snares of unfaithful pastors. Consequently, the
latter are leading fewer and fewer sheep along the paths
of perdition onto which they themselves have wandered,
as even a summary observation of the facts leads one to
conclude.
This is not a victory in itself, but it is a precious and
indispensable condition for one. The TFPs give thanks to
Our Lady for being able, within the spirit and methods of
the second part of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, to
do their share in the great struggle in which other whole-
some forces—one or another of great scope and capability
for action—are presently engaged.
5. AN ASSESSMENT OF TWENTY YEARS OF THE THIRD
REVOLUTION ACCORDING TO THE CRITERIA OF
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
The situation of the Third Revolution and the Counter-
Revolution has been outlined herein on the basis of how
they appear shortly before the twentieth anniversary of the
publication of this book.
On the one hand, the apogee of the Third Revolution
makes a success of the Counter-Revolution in the near
future more difficult than ever.
On the other, the same anti-socialist allergy that pres-
ently constitutes a grave obstacle to the victory of com-
munism creates medium-term conditions that are decid-
edly favorable for the Counter-Revolution. The various
counter-revolutionary groups spread throughout the world
have the noble historic responsibility of making good use
of these conditions.
The TFPs have strived to contribute their part to the
common effort, having spread during the last twenty years
across the Americas, with a new TFP in France, giving rise
to a similar dynamic organization in the Iberian peninsula,
CHAPTER II ewiss
and projecting its name and contacts in other countries of
the Old World with the strong desire of working with all
the counter-revolutionary groups fighting there.
Twenty years after the launching of Revolution and
Counter-Revolution, the TFPs and similar organizations
stand shoulder to shoulder with the front-line organiza-
tions in the counter-revolutionary struggle.
CHAPTER HI
The Aborning Fourth Revolution
The panorama presented here would be incomplete
were we to fail to mention an internal transformation in
the Third Revolution. It is the Fourth Revolution that is
being born of it.
It is being born, yes, in the manner of a matricidal
refinement. When the Second Revolution was born, it
refined,' overcame, and dealt a mortal blow to the First
Revolution. The same occurred when, by an analogous
process, the Third Revolution sprang from the second.
Everything indicates that the Third Revolution has now
arrived at the moment, at once culminating and fatal,
when it generates the Fourth Revolution and thus exposes
itself to being killed by it.
In the clash between the Third Revolution and the
Counter-Revolution, will there be time for the process
that generates the Fourth Revolution to develop entirely?
Will the latter effectively open a new stage in the history
of the Revolution? Or will it be simply an abortive phe-
nomenon, which will rise up and disappear without having
a major influence in the clash between the Third Revo-
1. See Part I, Chapter 6, 3.
CHAPTER III 157
lution and the Counter-Revolution? The greater or lesser
space to be reserved for the Fourth Revolution in these
hurried and summary notes would depend on the answer
to this question—an answer that only the future can give
completely.
Since what is uncertain should not be treated as if it had
the importance of what is certain, we will devote a very
limited space to what seems to be the Fourth Revolution.
1. THE FOURTH REVOLUTION FORETOLD BY THE
AUTHORS OF THE THIRD REVOLUTION
As is well known, neither Marx nor the generality of
his most notorious followers (whether orthodox or heter-
odox) considered the dictatorship of the proletariat to be
the final phase of the revolutionary process. This dictator-
ship is, according to them, nothing but the most refined,
dynamic aspect of the universal Revolution. And, in the
evolutionist mythology inherent to the thinking of Marx
and his followers, just as evolution will develop to infini-
ty over the centuries, so also the Revolution will be end-
less. From the First Revolution, two other revolutions
have already been born. The third, in its turn, will gener-
ate another. And so on...
It is impossible to predict within the Marxist perspec-
tive what the Twentieth or Fiftieth Revolution would be
like. However, it is possible to predict what the Fourth
Revolution will be like. This prediction has already been
made by the Marxists themselves.
This revolution will necessarily be the overthrow of the
dictatorship of the proletariat as a result of a new crisis.
Pressured by this crisis, the hypertrophic state will be vic-
tim of its own hypertrophy. And it will disappear, giving
rise to a scientistic and cooperationist state of things in
which—so the communists say—man will have attained a
158 PART III, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
heretofore inconceivable degree of liberty, equality, and
fraternity.
2. THE FOURTH REVOLUTION AND
TRIBALISM: AN EVENTUALITY?
How shall this come to pass? We cannot but wonder if
the tribal society dreamed of by today’s structuralist cur-
rents provides the answer to this question. Structuralism
sees in tribal life an illusory synthesis between the height
of individual liberty and of consentaneous collectivism, in
which the latter ends up devouring liberty. In this collec-
tivism, the various “I’s” or the individual persons, with
their intelligence, will, and sensibility, and consequently
with their characteristic and conflictual ways of being,
merge and dissolve in the collective personality of the
tribe, which generates one thought, one will, and one style
of being intensely common to all.
Of course, the road to this tribal state of things must pass
through the extinction of the old standards of individual
reflection, volition, and sensibility. These will be gradually
replaced by forms of thought, deliberation, and sensibility
that are increasingly collective. It is, therefore, principally
in this field that the transformation must take place.
In what manner? In tribes, the cohesion among the
members is assured mainly by a way of thinking and feel-
ing common to all, from which result common habits and
a common will. Individual reason is reduced to almost
nothing, in other words, to the first and most elementary
movements that this atrophied state permits. “Savage
thought,”? the thought that does not think and is turned
only to what is concrete—such is the price of the tribal
collectivist fusion. It belongs to the witch doctor to main-
tain, on a mystical level, this collective psychic life by
2. Cf. Claude Léevy-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1969).
CHAPTER III —159
means of totemic cults charged with confused “messages”
but rich in the ignes fatui or even fulgurations emanating
from the mysterious world of transpsychology or para-
psychology. By acquiring these “riches,” man would com-
pensate for the atrophy of reason.
Reason—formerly hypertrophied by free interpretation
of the Scriptures, Cartesianism, and other causes, divi-
nized by the French Revolution, used to the point of the
most unabashed abuse in every communist school of
thought—would now be atrophied and enslaved by trans-
psychological and parapsychological totemism.
A. The Fourth Revolution and the Preternatural
“Omnes dii gentium daemonia” (“All of the gods of the
gentiles are devils”), say the Scriptures.’ In this struc-
turalist perspective, in which magic is presented as a form
of knowledge, to what degree may a Catholic perceive the
deceitful flashes, the canticle (at once sinister and attrac-
tive, soothing and delirious, atheistic and fetishistically
credulous) with which, from the bottom of the abysses
where he lies eternally, the Prince of Darkness attracts
those who have denied Jesus Christ and His Church?
This is a question that theologians can and should
discuss. We mean the real theologians, that is, the few
who still believe in the existence of the devil and hell,
especially the few among these few who have the courage
to face the scorn and persecution of the mass media and
to speak out.
B. Structuralism and Pre-tribal Tendencies
To the extent that one secs the structuralist movement
as a more or less exact (but, in any event, precursory)
3. Psalm 95:5.
160 PART Il, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
figure of the Fourth Revolution, one must view certain
phenomena gencralized over the last decade or two as
preparing and driving the structuralist impetus.
Thus, the overthrow of the traditions of dress in the
West, increasingly eroded by nudism, obviously tends
toward the appearance and consolidation of habits that will
tolerate, at most, the cincture of feathers worn by certain
tribes, substituted, where the cold demands it, with cover-
ings somewhat like those used by the Laplanders.
The rapid disappearance of the rules of courtesy can
only end up in the absolute simplicity (to use only this
qualifier) of tribal manners.
The growing dislike for anything that is reasoned,
structured, and systematized, can only jead, in its last
paroxysms, to the perpetual and fanciful vagabondage of
jungle life, alternating, likewise, with the instinctive and
almost mechanical performance of some activities abso-
lutely indispensable to life.
The aversion to intellectual effort, notably to abstrac-
tion, theorization, and doctrinal thought, can only induce,
ultimately, a hypertrophy of the senses and of the imagi-
nation, resulting in the “civilization of the image,” about
which Paul VI felt duty-bound to warn mankind.‘
Also symptomatic are the ever more frequent idyllic
eulogies of a cultural revolution that will generate a
postindustrial socicty, still ill-defined but whose first
specimen would be—some say is—Chinese communism.
4. “We well know that modern man, overwhelined by speeches, gives
signs of being increasingly tired of listening and, worse still, of being
irresponsive to words. We are also aware of the opinions of numerous
psychologists and sociologists who affirm that modem man has already
transcended the civilization of the word—which has become practically
inefficacious and useless—and lives today in the civilization of the image”
(Apostolic exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi, December 8, 1975,
Documentos Pontificios, 6th ed. [Petropolis: Vozes, 1984], no. 188, p.30).
CHAPTER III 161
C. An Unpretentious Contribution
We know full well that panoramic views—always vast
and summary—lend themselves to many objections.
Necessarily abbreviated due to the constrictions of the
present chapter, our overview is but an unpretentious
contribution to the studious reflections of people gifted
with that daring and unique finesse of observation and
analysis which, in all epochs, enables some men to fore-
see tomorrow.
D. The Opposition of the Banal
Others, instead of using foresight, will simply do what
banal and timid souls have been doing throughout the
centuries. Smiling, they will term such transformations
impossible. Why? Because they clash with their mental
habits; these transformations violate common sense, and
for banal men, history normally follows the path of com-
mon sense. So, in face of these perspectives, they will
incredulously and optimistically smile, just as Leo X
smiled about the trivial “quarrel of friars,” which was all
he saw in the nascent First Revolution. Or they will smile
like the “Fenelonian” Louis XVI smiled when he saw the
first ferments of the Second Revolution in splendid palace
salons, lulled at times by the silvery sound of the harpsi-
chord, or glittering discreetly in bucolic ambiences and
scenes like his wife’s Hameau. His smile was no different
from that of many high—and some of the highest—digni-
tarics of the Church and of Western temporal society
before the manipulations of smiling post-Stalinist commu-
nism or the upheavals announcing the Fourth Revolution.
If one day the Third or Fourth Revolution, aided by
ecumenical progressivism in the spiritual realm, takes
over the temporal life of humanity, it will be due more to
162 PART II], TWENTY YEARS AFTER
the carelessness and collaboration of these smiling opti-
mistic prophets of common sense than to all the fury of
the revolutionary hosts and their propaganda.
COMMENTARY
Opposition From the
Prophets of Common Sense
These are strange prophets indeed, since their
prophecies invariably amount to affirmations that
nothing will happen.
Eventually their various forms of optimism con-
flicted so flagrantly with the post-1976 facts that, to
retain them, their adepts adopted the fallacious and
totally hypothetical hope that the recent events in
Eastern Europe will lead to the definitive disappear-
ance of communism and therefore of the revolution-
ary process it spearheaded until recently.°
E. Ecclesiastical Tribalism and Pentecostalism
Obviously, it is not only the temporal realm that the
Fourth Revolution wants to reduce to tribalism. It wants to
do the same with the spiritual realm. How this is to be done
can already be clearly seen in the currents of theologians
and canonists who intend to transform the noble, bone-like
rigidity of the ecclesiastical structure—as Our Lord Jesus
Christ instituted it and twenty centuries of
religious life molded it—-into a cartilaginous, soft, and
amorphous texture of dioceses and parishes without territo-
ries and of religious groups in which the firm canonical
authority is gradually replaced by the ascendancy of
5. Regarding this hope, see the commentaries added to Chapter 2 of this
Part IH.
CHAPTER III 163
Pentecostalist “prophets,” the counterparts of the structural-
ist-tribalist witch doctors. Eventually, these prophets will be
indistinguishable from witch doctors. The same goes for the
progressivist-Pentecostalist parish or diocese, which will
take on the appearances of the cell-tribe of structuralism.
COMMENTARY
The “Demonarchization” of the
Ecclesiastical Authorities
In this historical/conjectural perspective, certain
modifications in themselves alien to this process
could be seen as steps in a transition between the
pre-Conciliar status quo and the extreme opposite
indicated here.
An example of this would be the trend toward a
collegiality viewed as (1) the only acceptable means
for exercising power inside the Church and (2) an
expression of a “demonarchization” of ecclesiastical
authority, whose different levels would become ipso
facto much more conditioned by the levels immedi-
ately below them.
All this taken to its last consequences could tend
toward the stable and universal establishment of
popular suffrage inside the Church—not that on occa-
sion she did not use it to fill certain hierarchical
offices. In keeping with the dream of the advocates
of tribalism, it could eventually result in an indefen-
sible dependence of the whole hierarchy on the laity,
as supposedly the only voice of God. Of God? Or of
some witch doctor, whether a Pentecostalist guru or
a sorcerer, who feeds his “mystical revelations” to a
tribalistic laity? Would it be by obeying this laity that
the Church hierarchy would fulfill its mission of
obeying the will of God Himself?
164 PART III, TWENTY YEARS AFTER
3. THE DUTY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES IN
FACE OF THE ABORNING FOURTH REVOLUTION
When innumerable facts grouped in a reasonable way
suggest hypotheses like this one on the beginning of the
Fourth Revolution, what can the counter-revolutionary
still do?
In the light of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, it
behooves him, first of all, to emphasize the preponderant
role that the Revolution in the tendencies’ has in the
generative process of this Fourth Revolution and in the
world resulting from it. He should prepare to fight, not
only alerting men against this preponderance of the ten-
dencies, which is becoming the rule today even though
fundamentally subversive of good human order, but also
using all legitimate and appropriate means in the tenden-
tial field to combat this same revolution in the tendencies.
The counter-revolutionary should also observe, analyze,
and foresee the new steps of the process in order to erect
as soon as possible every obstacle against the supreme
form of tendential revolution and of revolutionary psy-
chological warfare: the aborning Fourth Revolution.
If the Fourth Revolution has time to develop before the
Third Revolution attempts its big adventure, the fight
against it might call for another chapter of Revolution and
Counter-Revolution. Such a chapter, all by itself, might
take up as much space as that devoted to the three pre-
vious revolutions. Why? Because processes of decadence
tend to complicate everything almost infinitely. This is
why each phase of the Revolution is more complex than
the preceding one and obliges the Counter-Revolution to
make efforts that are likewise more detailed and complex.
6. See Part I, Chapter 5, 1-3.
CHAPTER III 165
* * *
With these perspectives on the Revolution and the
Counter-Revolution and on the future of the work that
must be done in face of both, we end these considerations.
Uncertain, like everyone, about tomorrow, we prayer-
fully raise our eyes to the lofty throne of Mary, Queen of
the Universe, while addressing her in a paraphrase of the
Psalmist’s words to Our Lord:
Ad te levavi oculos meos, qui habitas in coelis. Ecce
sicut oculi servorum in manibus dominorum suorum,
sicut oculi ancillae in manibus dominae suae; ita oculi
nostri ad Dominam Matrem nostram donec misereatur
nostri. (Unto thee I lift up my eyes, unto thee, who
dwellest in the heavens. See how the eyes of servants
are fixed on the hands of their masters, the eyes of a
handmaid on the hand of her mistress! So our eyes are
fixed on Our Lady and Mother, waiting for her to have
mercy on us.)’
Yes, we turn our eyes to Our Lady of Fatima, request-
ing of her the contrition that will obtain for us the great
pardons, the strength to wage the great battles, and the
abnegation to be detached in the great victories that will
bring the establishing of her Reign. We desire these victo-
ries with our whole heart, even if to reach them, the Church
and the human race must undergo the apocalyptic—but
how just, regenerating, and merciful—chastisements she
predicted in 1917 at the Cova da Iria.
7. Cf. Psalm 122:1-2.
CONCLUSION
Having updated the first (1959) edition of Revolution
and Counter-Revolution by the addition of the preceding
pages, we wondered if the brief Conclusion to the original
text and to subsequent editions should be replaced or at
least modified. After rereading it carefully, we are con-
vinced there is no reason to omit it or even alter it.
We say today,as we said then: In view of what is stated
herein, the present-day scene is very clear for anyone who
acknowledges the logic of the counter-revolutionary prin-
ciples. We are in the extreme throes of a struggle between
the Church and the Revolution, a struggle that would be
mortal if one of the contenders were not immortal. There-
fore, in concluding, it is right that we, sons of the Church
and fighters in the battles of the Counter-Revolution,
should filially consecrate this book to Our Lady.
It was the Immaculate Virgin who crushed the head of
the Serpent, the first, the major, the eternal revolutionary,
the instigator and foremost upholder of this Revolution, as
of any before or after it. Mary is, therefore, the Patroness
of all those who fight against the Revolution.
The universal and all-powerful mediation of the Mother
of God is the counter-revolutionarics’ greatest reason for
hope. And, at Fatima, she already gave them the certainty
of victory when she declared that, even after an eventual
surge of communism throughout the world, “finally, my
Immaculate Heart will triumph!”
We beseech the Virgin, therefore, to accept this filial
homage, a tribute of love and an expression of absolute
confidence in her triumph.
We would not wish to end this work without a tribute
of filial devotion and unrestricted obedience to the “sweet
168 CONCLUSION
Christ on earth,” the pillar and infallible foundation of the
Truth, His Holiness Pope John XXIII.
“Ubi Ecclesia ibi Christus, ubi Petrus ibi Ecclesia”
(“Where the Church is, there is Christ; where Peter is,
there is the Church”). It is then to the Holy Father that we
direct our love, our enthusiasm, our dedication. It is with
these sentiments, which have animated all the pages of
Catolicismo since its foundation, that we have ventured to
publish this work.
We have not the slightest doubt in our heart about any
of the theses that constitute this work. Nevertheless, we
subject them unrestrictedly to the judgment of the Vicar
of Christ and are disposed to renounce immediately any
one of them if it depart even slightly from the teaching of
the Holy Church, our Mother, the Ark of Salvation, and
the Gate of Heaven.
POSTFACE
After reading the previous words, the reader will nec-
essarily wonder where the revolutionary process stands
today. Is the Third Revolution still alive? Or does the
collapse of the Soviet empire permit us to affirm that
the Fourth Revolution is erupting in the deepest levels of
the political reality of Eastern Europe, or even that it has
won?
We must make a distinction. Today, the currents of
thought that advocate the implantation of the Fourth
Revolution have spread—though in different forms—
throughout the world and reveal nearly everywhere a
marked tendency to increase in volume.
In this sense, the Fourth Revolution is in a crescendo
that is promising to those who desire it and threatening to
those who oppose it. However, it would be exaggerated
to say that the present order of things in the former
ULS.S.R. is already totally modcled according to the
Fourth Revolution and that nothing of the Third Revo-
lution remains there.
The Fourth Revolution, although having also a political
dimension, identifies itself as a cultural revolution. In
other words, it broadly encompasses all aspects of human
existence. Therefore, the political clashes that may occur
among the nations that once formed the U.S.S.R. could
strongly condition the Fourth Revolution, yet they will
hardly dominate the events, the ensemble of human acts
encompassed by the cultural revolution.
But what about the public opinion of the former Soviet
countries (many of them still ruled by old communists)?
Has it nothing to tell us about this, since, according to
170 POSTFACE
Revolution and Counter-Revolution, it had such a great
role in the previous revolutions?
This question cannot be answered unless other ques-
tions are answered first. Is there truly a public opinion in
these countries? Can it be induced to participate in a
systematic revolutionary process? If not, what are the
plans of the top national and international leaders of
communism for orienting this public opinion?
These questions are difficult to answer, as presently
public opinion in the former Soviet world is evidently
indifferent, amorphous, and immobilized by the weight of
seventy years of total dictatorship. Under this tyranny,
every individual feared to manifest his religious or politi-
cal opinion in many circles, even to his closest relative or
most intimate friend. A probable denunciation—veiled or
open, true or false—could consign him to indefinite hard
labor on the frozen expanses of Siberia. Nevertheless,
these questions must be answered if we are to render a
prognosis of the course of events in the erstwhile Soviet
world.
Moreover, the international media continues to publi-
cize the eventual migration of famished semicivilized—
ergo semibarbarian—-hordes to the prosperous European
countries living under the regime of Western con-
sumerism.
Starved not only of food but of ideas, what do these
pitiable people understand of the free world, at once super-
civilized and gangrenous? On meeting it, would they not
clash with it?
And what would result from this clash, both in an
invaded Europe and, by extension, in the old Soviet
world? A self-managing, cooperationist, structuralist-
tribalist revolution’ or an immediate world of total anar-
1. See Part III, Chapter 2, commentary “Perestroika and Glasnost:
Dismantling the Third Revolution or Metamorphosing Communism?”
171
chy, of chaos and horror, which we would not hesitate to
call the Fifth Revolution?
At the moment this edition goes to press, any answer
to these questions would be manifestly premature. Not
that they should not be asked now, for the future is so
unpredictable that it might be too late to ask them tomor-
row. Indeed, of what use are books, thinkers, or remnants
of civilization in a tribal world beset by the hurricanes of
the disordered human passions and the deliria of struc-
turalist-tribalist “mysticism”? What a tragic situation, in
which nobody would be anything in the empire of
Nothingness.
Gorbachev is still in Moscow, where he will remain, at
least as long as he does not accept the highly preferential
invitations quickly extended him by the prestigious uni-
versities of Harvard, Stanford, and Boston after his down-
fall, or the regal hospitality offered by Juan Carlos I, King
of Spain, in the renowned palace of Lanzarote, on the
Canary Islands,’ or the university chair to which he was
invited by the famous Collége de France.’
Defeated in the East, the communist ex-leader’s only
difficulty seems to be choosing among the many flatter-
ing invitations he is receiving from the West. Thus far, he
has decided to write a syndicated series of articles for
newspapers in the capitalist world—a world whose high-
est levels continue to provide him fervent and inexplica-
ble support—-and to travel to the United States amid great
publicity to raise funds for the Gorbachev Foundation.
2. Cf. Folha de S. Paulo, December 21, 1991.
3. Cf. O Estado de S. Paulo, January 11, 1992.
4. Cf. Le Figaro, March 12, 1992.
172 _ POSTFACE
Thus, even though Gorbachev is overshadowed in his
own country—and seriously questioned in the West—
Western magnates endeavor in various ways to maintain
the floodlights of a flattering publicity beamed on the man
of perestroika, who made a point, throughout his whole
political career, of showing that his reform is not commu-
nism’s contrary but its refinement.’
As for the weak Soviet federation that was agonizing
when Gorbachev was overthrown, it became a quasiphan-
tasmal “Commonwealth of Independent States,” whose
inter-member friction worries statesmen and _ political
analysts. Several of these republics have nuclear weapons
and the capability to launch them at a neighbor (or at the
enemies of Islam, whose influence grows daily in the
former Soviet world), causing great apprehension among
those concerned for global balance.
The effects of these eventual atomic aggressions could
be multiple. Principal among them could be the exodus
of populations formerly contained by the Iron Curtain.
Driven by the rigors of bitter winters and by the dangers
of immense catastrophes, they might feel redoubled im-
pulses to “request” the hospitality of Western Europe...
and of American nations.
In Brazil, Lionel Brizola, Governor of the State of Rio
de Janeiro, has already proposed (to the applause of the
nation’s minister of agriculture) attracting farmers from
Eastern Europe through government land-reform pro-
grams.° Argentine president Carlos Menem, in contacts
with the European Economic Community, has said he is
willing to have his country accept many thousands of
these immigrants.’ The head of the Colombian Foreign
5, See Part Il], Chapter 2, commentary “Perestroika and Glasnost:
Dismantling the Third Revolution or Metamorphosing Communism?”
6. Cf. Jornal da Tarde, Sao Paulo, December 27, 1991.
7. Cf. Ambito Financeiro, Buenos Aires, February 19, 1992.
173
Office, Mrs. Nohemi Sanin, has stated that her country’s
government was studying the possibility of admitting
technicians from the East.* This is how imminent the
waves of invasion may be.
And what of communism? What happened to it? En-
thralled at the perspective of a long-lasting universal
peace, or even an everlasting peace that would abolish the
terrible specter of a global nuclear hecatomb, most of
Western public opinion was gripped by the sensation that
communism had died.
The West’s honeymoon with this supposed paradise of
amity and peace is gradually losing its harmony, as evi-
denced by the above-mentioned threat of all sorts of
aggressions thundering in the territories of the defunct
U.S.S.R. Will the Western impression that communism
has ended prove any more reliable?
At first, the voices that questioned the authenticity of
communism’s demise were few, isolated, and poorly
documented.
Nevertheless, little by little, shadows began to appear
on the horizon. It was noted that in countries of central
Europe, the Balkans, or the former U.S.S.R. some of the
new holders of power had been important figures in the
local communist party. The move toward privatization in
all these countries, with the exception of the old East
Germany, is generally more apparent than real, proceeding
at a snail’s pace that reveals the lack of an entirely defined
direction.
So, did communism die in these countries? Or did it
simply enter into a complicated metamorphosis? The
doubts in this matter are growing just as the last echoes
of the universal rejoicing at the supposed collapse of
communism are discreetly fading away.
The Western communist parties had withered in the
8. Cf. El Tiempo, Bogota, February 22, 1992.
174 POSTFACE
sight of all at the crash of the first cave-ins of the U.S.S.R.
But already today several of them are reorganizing under
new names. Is the change of names a resurrection? A meta-
morphosis? I am inclined to opt for the second hypothesis.
As for certainties, only the future can give them.
This updating of the general scene in face of which the
world is taking a position seemed indispensable for any
attempt to impart a little light and order to a horizon in
whose quadrants chaos is predominating. And what is the
spontaneous path of chaos if not the unintelligible wors-
ening of itself?
Amid this chaos, only one thing will not fail, namely,
the prayer transcribed a little earlier and which is in my
heart and on my lips, just as it is in the heart of all who see
and think as I do:
Unto thee I lift up my eyes, unto thee, who dwellest in
the heavens. See how the eyes of servants are fixed on
the hands of their masters, the eyes of a handmaid on
the hand of her mistress! So our eyes are fixed on Our
Lady and Mother, waiting for her to have mercy on us.
Behold the affirmation of the unvarying confidence of
the Catholic soul, which kneels but remains firm amid the
general convulsion—firm with all the firmness of those
who, in the storm, and with a strength of soul even greater
than it, continue to affirm from the bottom of their heart:
“Credo in Unam, Sanctam, Catholicam et Apostolicam
Ecclesiam,” that is, “I believe in the Holy Roman Catholic
and Apostolic Church, against which, as promised to Saint
Peter, the gates of hell will never prevail.”
INDEX
Ambiences, 63
Anarchism, 3, 53, 54
Aristocracy: dealings with other
classes, 110
democracy and, 18-20, 48
hostility toward, 18-20, 48
vulgarization of, 109
Arts, the, 63
Atheism: deism and, 18
egalitarianism and, 47
French Revolution and, 16, 17
secularism and, 4, 47
Authority: legitimate, 44
revolt against legitimate, 3, 4,
16, 18, 47, 52, 162, 163
revolutionary, 53
Babcuf, Francois-Noel, 17, 32
Catholic Action, 120, 151
Chaos, postcommunist, 134, 174
Church, Catholic: center of clash
between Revolution and Counter-
Revolution, 150-151, 167
civilization and, 44-46
coexistence with communism,
111, 112, 161-162
Counter-Revolution and, 76, 114-
121
crisis in, 145-150
forms of government and, 18-20
leftist infiltration of, 130, 149-
150, 152
other churches and, 57, 130n
poverty and, 108
revolt against hierarchical nature
of, 16-18, 163
revolutionary psychological war-
fare and, 149
single front of Revolution
against, 36-37
soul of Counter-Revolution, 117
Civilization: Catholic, 44-46
purpose of society and State, 45
Collectivism: Church opposition to,
te
massification and, 49
tribalism and, 158
Communism: apogee of, 129-132
Catholic Church and, 111, 112,
130, 144-145, 149-153
Chinese, 160
crisis of, 130-131, 136-141, 157
death of, 157, 173
détente with, 147-150
dictatorship of the proletariat,
18, 157
effects of, 170, 172
Euro-, 139
glasnost and, 133, 136
goal of, 3, 54
infiltration by, 130, 149, 151-153
metamorphoses of, 133-136, 138-
139, 141-142, 173-174
optimism in face of, 161-162
perestroika and, 133-136, 170n
phase of Revolution, 3, 17, 156-
157
progressivism and, 150
revolutionary psychological war-
fare by, 141-145, 149
socialism and, 32, 127
TFPs and, 151-153
Vatican Council I] and, 144-145
Counter-Revolution, the: authority
and, 102
Catholic Action and, 120
Church and, 76, 114-121
conservatism and, 79
defined, 75
178
Counter-Revolution (continued)
driving force of, 103-104
explicit, 118-119
implicit, 118-119
invincibility of, 104
metaphysical aspects of, 102
militarism and, 113
modernity of, 74, 118-119
nationalism and, 113
no class favoritism in, 109-110
nobility of, 73
non-Catholics and, 120-121
not anachronistic, 74, 91-92
not argumentative, 92-93
not mere negation, 92
obstacles to, 90-95
on world government, 112
order and, 76
partisan politics and, 120
process of, 96, 98-101
progress according to, 79-80
a reaction, 73-74
revives notion of good and evil,
105-106
stages of, 102
tactics of, 83-87, 94-95, 101-
102, 105-106
temporal society and, 107-113
traditionalism and, 75-76, 77-78
Counter-revolutionary: actual, 81,
83-84
becoming a, 96, 98-101
duty of present-day, 164
explicit, 118-119
implicit, 118-119
potential, 79
Cultural revolution. See also Revo-
lution, tendential: 142, 169
Culture, Catholic, 44-46
Democracy: aristocracy within, 19-
20
other forms of government and,
18-20, 48
revolutionary, 18-20, 48
Deism, 18
INDEX
Détente, 138-139, 149-150
Dictatorship, 20-23
Ecumenism, 105-106, 120-121
Elites, 19-20, 22, 86-87, 109
Equality (and egalitarianism):
among nations, 49-50
between man and God, 47-48
communism and, 3, 4, 18, 111
ecclesiastical, 48
economic, 49
French Revolution and, 4, 16-17
hatred for God and, 47, 50
intermediate bodies and, 48-49
liberalism and, 51
massification and, 48, 49
natural, 50-51
political, 48
pride and, 3, 46-51
Protestantism and, 3, 16
Teligious, 48
sensuality and, 51-54
social, 48
tribalism and, 3, 54, 157-160
Eurocommunism, 139
Free will, 28, 56
Freedom (and liberty), 3, 52-54
Freemasonry, 37-38
French Revolution: egalitarianism
and, 16-17
incipient communism in, 17, 31,
32, 58
metamorphoses of, 24-25
phase of Revolution, 3, 16-17,
157
Glasnost, 133-136
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 133-136,
17]
Government, forms of, 17, 18-20,
34-35
Hierarchy (and inequality): hatred
of, 3-4, 19, 47-50, 54
limits of, 50-51
Hierarchy (continued)
need of, 50
within the soul, 51
Humanism, 15-16, 129
Islam: in former Soviet Union, 172
invading the West, 134-135
Jesus Christ, 43
John XXIII: on destruction of
order, 43
John Paul II: on crisis in the
Church, 147
Leo XIII: on forms of government,
18
on freemasonry, 38
on Middle Ages, 41-42
Liberalism: defined, 52
denies Original Sin, 66
egalitarianism and, 3, 51, 52-54
freedom and, 52
sensuality and, 51
socialism and, 53
Middle Ages: decay of, 14-15
excellence of, 41-42
order and, 41
Military, the, 70, 113
Monarchy: absolutist, 49
excellence of, 18-19
hostility toward, 18-19, 48, 49
Protestant, 34-35
Order: defined, 21, 75
destruction of, 41
future, 75-76
medieval Christendom, 41-42
Original Sin: effect on soul, 51, 56
Revolution on, 65-67
Ostpolitik: crisis of communism
and, 138
self-destruction of Church and,
149-150
TFPs resist Vatican, 152-153
179
Pacifism, 70
Passions: defined, 46-47, 103
driving force of Revolution, 29
Paul VI: leftist infiltration and, 147,
151-152
on “smoke of Satan” in the
Church, 146
on today’s “civilization of the
image,” 160
Vatican Council II and, 146-147,
148
Pentecostalism, 162-163
Perestroika, 133-136, 170n
Pius VI: on monarchy, 19
Pius IX: on revolutionary Catho-
lics, 37
Pius X, Saint: on apostolate, 99
on Catholic civilization, 46
on ecumenical relations, 121
on forms of government, 19
Pius XII: on collectivism, 49
on democracy, 19-20
on inequality, 50
on progress, 79-80
Pride: cause of Revolution, 3, 16
egalitarianism and, 3, 47-51
Protestant austerity and, 35-36
Progress, 79-80
Progressivism, religious, 150, 162-
163
Protestantism: fruit of pride and
sensuality, 16
phase of Revolution, 15-16, 30,
31, 129
Protestants: apostolate with, 121
austerity among, 35-36
cooperation of, 120-121
monarchism among, 34-35
Psychological warfare, revolution-
ary, 141-144
Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal: on crisis
in the Church, 148
Reason: tribalism and, 158-159
Renaissance, 15-16, 91, 129
Revolution, the: advance of, 14-18,
180
Revolution: advance of (continued)
24-25, 28, 29-31
agents of, 36-37
ambiences and, 63-64
antimilitarism of, 69-70
arts and, 63-64
bloody and unbloody, 40-41
catch phrases of, 91-94
characteristics of, 11-14
defeating, 98-102
defined, 40, 41, 46
depths of, 26-28
driving force of, 29, 103
goal of, 41, 54, 67-68
metamorphoses of, 24-25, 30-31
on sin, 65-67
optimism in face of, 161-162
origins, 14-15, 55, 56-57
police under, 69
prefigures of, 42
regionalism and, 50
science, view of, 67, 69
single front of, 36
speeds of, 31-32, 53, 96-98
stages of, 24-25, 27, 30-31,
66-67, 93, 129
tendential, 26, 142, 164
Revolutionaries: fast-paced, 31-32,
96-97, 100, 101
semi-counter-, 34, 60, 85, 97-98
slow-paced, 33, 97, 100-101
slow-paced, with counter-
revolutionary “clots,” 33-34, 85
Rock and roll, 53-54
Secularism, 47-48, 105-106
Self-management, 127n, 136, 170
Sensuality: cause of Revolution, 3,
16
egalitarianism and, 51
liberalism and, 3, 51-54
Protestant austerity and, 35-36
Socialism: communism and, 32
cultural revolution and, 142
refinement of liberalism, 53
self-managing, 127n, 136, 170
INDEX
Sorbonne rebellion, the, 142
Structuralism, 158-160
Tendencies, disorderly, 26-27, 29,
30, 62
TFPs, 126-127, [51-155
Thomas Aquinas, Saint: on inequali-
ty, 50
Tribalism: collectivism in, 158-159
counteracting, 164
ecclesiastical, 162-163
nascent, 156-158
optimism in face of, 161-162
phase of Revolution, 156-158
the preternatural and, 159
ULS.S.R., former, 169-174
Vatican Council II, 144-149
West, the: invasion of, 134-135
172-173
supports Gorbachev, 133, 171-
172
World government, 18, 49-50, 67,
112
Some Testimonies of
Illustrious Figures
Regarding Books
by the Author
Revolution
and
Counter-Revolution
As we mentioned in the Foreword, the publication of Revolution and
Counter-Revolution had an immediate and profound impact. Ecclesiasti-
cal personages like those already quoted, as well as theologians, profes-
sors, and conservative leaders from around the world, acclaimed the
author’s analysis of and solution to the contemporary crisis. More than
thirty years after its first edition, the essay’s repercussion continues to
grow, especially among youth. Three testimonies regarding Revolution
and Counter-Revolution are herein transcribed exempli gratia. —Ed.
183
Lima, July 24, 1961
NUNCIATURA APOSOLICA
EN EL PERU
Distinguished Professor,
The reading of your book “Revolution and Counter-Revolution”
made a magnificent impression on me because of the courage and
mastery with which you analyze the process of the Revolution and
shed abundant light on the true causes of the crumbling of moral
values disorienting consciences today, and also because of the vigor
with which you indicate the tactic and the methods to overcome it.
I especially appreciated the second part of your book, highlighting
the efficacy of Catholic doctrine and the spiritual remedies the
Church possesses to combat and vanquish the forces and errors of
the Revolution.
Tam certain that your book has rendered an important service to
the Catholic cause and that it will help gather the forces of good in
order to soon solve this great contemporary problem. This is, in my
opinion, the way repeatedly indicated by the present Vicar of Christ,
who, with so much conviction and solicitude, has insisted on a
profound renewal of Christian and sacramental life as a sure remedy
for the evils afflicting the world, evils that government leaders vainly
seck to solve through the precarious efficacy of weapons, technology,
and purely human progress.
I wish, most dear Professor, a widespread diffusion of and a well-
merited response to your book from Catholic leaders wishing to join
the ranks of the counter-revolutionary movement.
Please accept the testimony of my sincere admiration for your
work and the expression of my deepest esteem.
=f" | ROOOE Carkoer c
Romolo Carboni
Titular Archbishop of Sidon
Apostolic Nuncio
184
Archbishop Romolo Carboni
Archbishop Romolo Carboni was born in Fano, Italy, in
1911. Ordained in 1934, he was made a bishop in 1953. He was
raised to the archepiscopate and appointed Apostolic Nuncio to
Peru in 1959, He served as Nuncio to Italy from 1969 to 1986
and now lives in retirement in Fano.
185
SANTO DOMINGO EL REAL 4
DOMINICAN FATHERS July 17, 198
Dear Friend,
Yesterday, at a stretch, I read the 1978 Spanish edition of your
magnificent book “Revolution and Counter-Revolution,” which you
had kindly sent me.
I had already read other works of yours and I have been aware of
your colossal defense of Christian civilization for quite a while.
J] understand perfectly the third part of this edition (“Twenty Years
After”), on the congern regarding the infiltration of the Church in
the post-Conciliar times. Since your faith is deeply rooted in the
indefectability of THE CHURCH, this phenomenon will be a further
stimulus to labor with hope. ...
A small book of mine will be ready next month. I will send you a
copy as soon as it is available.
With an embrace,
\yi conus Rredi pred 0) Oo
Victorino Rodriguez, O.P.
Fr. Victorino Rodriguez
Fr. Victorino Rodriguez y Rodriguez, O.P., is one of the
most distinguished intellectual figures of Spain today. Born
in Carriles, Asturias, on February 14, 1926, he joined the
Order of Saint Dominic when he was 19. Ordained a priest in
1952, he travelled to Rome to complete his studies and obtain
a doctorate.
An eminent theologian and presently prior of the Convent of
Santo Domingo el Real in Madrid, he was professor of the
School of Theology of San Esteban in Salamanca and held a
chair at the Pontifical University of the same city. He is
professor of Madrid’s Superior Council of Scientific Investi-
gations and member of both the Royal Academy of Doctors of
the same city and the Pontifical Roman Theological Academy.
More than 250 of his books and articles have been published,
many by the renowned publishing house Biblioteca de Autores
Cristianos of Madrid.
186
A review by a world-renowned canonist
It was with extreme interest, pleasure, and personal benefit that I
read the Spanish copy of Prof. Plinio Corréa de Oliveira’s work
dedicated to me with expressions of great affection and esteem, for
which I am grateful.
“Revolution and Counter-Revolution” is a masterly work whose
teachings should be disseminated far and wide so as to penetrate the
conscience, not only of all those who consider themselves truly
Catholic, but I would say even more, of all other men of good will.
In it, the latter would learn that salvation can be found only in Jesus
Christ and His Church; the former would feel confirmed and forti-
fied in their Faith and psychologically and spiritually forewarned
and immunized against the cunning process that employs many of
them as useful idiots or fellow travelers.
Its analysis of the revolutionary process is impressive and reveal-
ing on account of its realism and profound understanding of histo-
ry, from the end of the Middle Ages in decadence, which paved the
way for the paganizing Renaissance and the pseudo-Reformation,
thence for the terrible French Revolution, and, soon after, atheistic
Communism.
That historical analysis is not only external. The actions and reac-
tions it deals with are also explained in light of the human psychol-
ogy, both the individual psychology and the collective psychology
of the masses. However, it is necessary to recognize that someone
directs this profound and systematic de-Christianization. Man
undoubtedly tends toward evil—pride and sensuality—but were
not someone holding the reins of these disorderly tendencies and
sagaciously coordinating them, they most probably would not have
produced such a constant, skillful, and systematic action, which, tena-
ciously maintained, profits even from the ups and downs caused by
the resistance and natural “reaction” of the opposing forces.
“Revolution and Counter-Revolution” also foresees, although
using caution in its prognoses and by means of hypotheses, the next
possible evolution of the revolutionary action and, in turn, that of
the Counter-Revolution.
The book abounds in perspicacious sociological, political, psy-
chological, and evolutive insights and observations, not few of
which are worthy of an anthology. Many of them outline the intelli-
gent “tactics” that favor the Revolution and those that may and
should be used in a general counter-revolutionary “strategy.”
In sum, I would dare to affirm that this is a prophetic work in the
187
best sense of the word. It should be taught in the Church’s centers of
higher education so that at least the elite classes become fully aware
of a crushing reality about which, I believe, they do not have a clear
notion. This, among other things, would contribute to revealing and
unmasking the useful idiots or fellow travelers, among whom are
found many ecclesiastical figures, who act in a suicidal manner by
playing the enemy’s game; this group of idiots, allies of the
Revolution, would in good measure disappear. . . .
The second part of the book well explains the Counter-
Revolution’s nature and the courageous and “aggressive” tactics
that counter-revolutionaries must implement while always avoiding
excesses and improper and imprudent attitudes.
Before such realities, one doubts there is a true “strategy” in the
Church as there is in the Revolution. One does find many “tactical”
elements, actions, and institutions, but they seem to act in isolation,
without a notion of the whole. The concept of a Counter-Revolution
and the realization that a Counter-Revolution is acting could unify
and provide a greater sense of collaboration within the Church.
I must congratulate the TFP movement for the stature and quality
of its founder, Prof. Plinio. I foresee and desire with all my soul a vast
development and a future full of counter-revolutionary successes for
the TFP.
I conclude stating that the spirit with which this work is written
greatly impresses me: It is a profoundly Christian spirit, one with a
passionate love for the Church. This book is an authentic product of
Christian wisdom. It is moving to find in a layman such a sincere
devotion to the Mother of Jesus and ours—a clear sign of predestina-
tion: “Uncertain, like everyone, about tomorrow, we prayerfully
raise our eyes to the lofty throne of Mary, Queen of the Universe. .. .
We beseech the Virgin, therefore, to accept this filial homage, a trib-
ute of love and an expression of absolute confidence in her triumph”
(pp. 165, 167).
Rome, September 8, 1993
Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady
Gulia
Fr. Anastasio Gutiérrez, C.M.F.
188
Fr. Anastasio Gutiérrez
Fr. Anastasio Gutiérrez, C.M.F., is one of the Catholic
Church’s most renowned canonists.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1911, Father Gutiérrez
is a Spanish citizen who has lived in Rome for the last fifty
years.
In Rome, he received his doctorate in Canon Law from the
Pontifical Lateran University. Later, he held a chair at that
university’s School of Canon Law, eventually becoming its
dean.
Father Gutiérrez served as a peritus during the Second
Vatican Council, and for many years was Cardinal Larraona’s
assistant in the Congregation for the Religious. He also is a
founder of the Institutum Iuridicum Claretianum of Rome.
He participated in the commission charged to write the new
Code of Canon Law, and is presently a consultant to the fol-
lowing Vatican dicasteries: Congregation for the Oriental
Churches, Congregation for the Clergy, and Congregation for
the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic
Life. He is also a consultant to the Pontifical Council for the
Interpretation of Legislative Texts, the highest Church organ for
canonical questions.
More recently, Father Gutiérrez became postulator of Queen
Isabella of Castile’s cause of canonization.
189
Nobility and
Analogous Traditional Elites
in the Allocutions of Pius XII
190
Rome, February 10, 1993
ota SES 0)
Distinguished Professor,
It was with keen interest that I read your work “Nobility and
Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII to the
Roman Patriciate and Nobility.”
The thought of the great Pope Pius XII, as one can see in the
documents mentioned, remains entirely relevant, and you have taken
the good initiative of presenting it to today’s public along with
opportune annotations. It is useful to remind people, as Paul VI him-
self did after the Second Vatican Council, that the teachings his
predecessor addressed to the Roman Patriciate and Nobility continue
to be fully valid.
In the comments and documentation with which you facilitate a
more complete understanding of the full range of Pius XII’s magis-
terium, one can see great erudition and sureness of thought, justly
highlighted by the well-known French historian Georges Bordonove in
his foreword to [the French edition of] this work.
I am certain that I am performing a good deed by recommending
your book to all who wish to deepen their knowledge of the wise and
enlightening teachings of Pius XII.
Hoping your timely book will have a wide circulation, | send you
cordial greetings.
m2 Gent bale,
Silvio Card. Oddi
191
Silvio Cardinal Oddi
Silvio Cardinal Oddi was born in Morfasso, in the province
of Piacenza, Italy, in 1910. Having completed his studies at the
Angelicum of Rome, he entered the Pontifical Ecclesiastical
Academy. At the service of the Secretariat of State, the still very
young Father Oddi began a brilliant career in Vatican diplomacy.
Cardinal Oddi speaks several languages and is one of the best
informed ecclesiastics on the Middle East, where he held diplo-
matic posts in several countries. On behalf of the Holy Sec, he
also undertook very delicate missions in Yugoslavia and in Cuba
immediately after the accession of the communist regime. In
1969, while Apostolic Nuncio in Belgium, he received the news
of his elevation to the cardinalate. Since then he has resided in
Rome, holding high offices in the Vatican Curia. In 1979, John
Paul IJ made him Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, a
position he held until 1985. He is presently Pontifical Legate for
the Sanctuary of Saint Francis of Assisi.
Cardinal Oddi, an expert on life in the Vatican, of which he
has been a protagonist in the last decades, is often interviewed
by the Italian and international press on the situation of the
Church in our days.
192
Rome, February 18, 1993
Distinguished Professor,
Your great renown and the words of praise and encouragement
given for your work by the illustrious Fr. Victorino Rodriguez, O.P.,
generally considered one of the glories of contemporary theology,
have led me to read with lively interest your book “Nobility and
Analogous Traditional Elites in the AHocutions of Pius XII to the
Roman Patriciate and Nobility.”
When Pius XII gave the world the splendid series of fourteen
allocutions to the Roman Patriciate and Nobility, there were many
who saw them less as a theological, philosophical, and historical
work regarding values destined to yet play a fundamental and time-
less role, than as a nostalgic effusion of love for virtues, greatnesses,
and glories that the world understood less and less.
The most recent of the abovementioned allocutions was that of
1953. More than thirty years later, we can now see how wrong these
people were. Indeed, Pius XII had seen the course of events correctly.
Today, not only is the old hostility to the nobility gradually dying
out, but there are prominent intellectuals emerging most everywhere
who emphasize how detrimental is the loss of authentic elites—with
the concomitant vulgarization of the human type—to culture and to
the lifestyle of contemporary society. This is why in many places we
now see manifested an ardent aspiration for the restoration of the
influence of authentic elites over the multitudes, so that the latter may
once again become—in accordance with Pius XII’s teachings—peo-
ples instead of nameless masses (cf. Christmas radio message of His
Holiness Pius XII, 1944).
In this historical context, your work proves to be extraordinarily
timely, since in echoing the magisterium of Pope Pius XII and
commenting on it with such notable penctration and consistency, it
makes an appeal to the nobility and the analogous elites to contribute,
with more courage than ever before, toward the common spiritual
and temporal good of all nations.
Indeed it falls to them, as that immortal Pope underscored, to
193
fulfill the precious mission of communicating by example, word, and
action the treasure of religious and temporal truths of Christianity,
the luminous torch of so many truths that societies can never forget
without the risk of succumbing to the vortex of chaos and moral
misery that threatens them.
I therefore hope for the best of receptions for your book, to which
you have devoted the vast resources of your intelligence and erudi-
tion, besides your unlimited love for the Church. May it please
Divine Providence to grant it widespread circulation, so that both the
preferential option for the nobles, inspired by Pius XII and high-
lighted by you, and the preferential option for the poor, to whom the
current Pontiff has devoted his ardent love, will be forever better
understood.
y “¢ , Ge
Mario Luigi Card. Ciappi, O.P.
194
Mario Luigi Cardinal Ciappi
Mario Luigi Cardinal Ciappi, O.P., was born in Florence on
October 6, 1909, and was ordained a priest on March 26, 1932.
For many years he was a professor at the Angclicum, where he
taught Moral and Dogmatic Theology and Mariology. Among
his students was the then Father Karol Wojtyla, later His
Holiness John Paul IJ. Cardinal Ciappi went on to become dean
of the Faculty of Theology at this athenaeum. He was elevated
to the episcopal dignity as titular of the Church of Miseno on
June 10, 1977, and in the Consistory of June 27 of the same year
he received the cardinal’s hat from the hands of Paul VI.
Until 1989 he was theologian of the Pontifical Household,
that is, private theologian of the Holy Father. Cardinal Ciappi is
currently president of the Pontifical Roman Academy of Saint
‘Thomas Aquinas and Catholic Doctrine, which gathers some of
the greatest names in contemporary theology.
195
Alfons M. Card. Stickler, sp
Vatican City, Feast of Saint Joseph, 1993
Most illustrious Professor,
I thank you heartily for the kind gift of your work “Nobility and
Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII to the
Roman Patriciate and-Nobility,” sent to me in its Italian translation.
It made a deep impression on me for several reasons: first of all,
for its timeliness, in that it is the reaffirmation of the teachings of the
great Pope Pius XII on the subject at a historico-cultural moment
when ferocious hostility to the nobility, spread all over the world by
the French Revolution, seems everywhere to be diminishing.
Secondly, the work—amid the universal decay of natural and,
above all, Christian values—will awaken in many hearts everywhere
the desire to see nobiliary elites, who in past centuries played an
important and often decisive role in upholding these values through
their lives and actions, once again setting for humanity the examples
it needs so urgently and supremely.
A third reason derives from your observations—which seem to
me extremely relevant—regarding the formation, alongside the no-
bilities and elites of blood, of nobilities and elites of spirit and mind
that, by associating and organizing among the many existing noble
souls, are assuming all over the world the roles of exemplars of and
guides toward a natural and perennial order of things. This, whether
to support the nobilities of blood still existent and now re-emerging,
or to replace those no longer capable of efficaciously reacting to the
manifest decadence of our days, as has happened in more than one
instance.
Using vast and solid documentation, you have done a fine analysis
of the very complex sociopolitical reality of our day, and comment-
ing with great logical rigor on the luminous teachings of Pius XII,
you have shown how much he and his successors up to John Paut II
196
continue to expect from the existing nobility and future analogous
elites for the religious, moral, and cultural uplifting of the world.
I therefore rejoice at this book, illustrious Professor, and wish it a
broad circulation, so it may spark, sustain, and build a deep and vast
sensitivity to this excellent tool for the re-creation of a sound natural
ethics and a revived religious morality that may lead all humanity to
that peace, prosperity, and happiness that only authentic and genuine
values can realize and guarantee.
To these good wishes I add my fervent prayers to the Lord and to
the Mother of the Church, that they may sustain you in the work
which is both beneficent and painfully pressing in the times in which
we live.
Yours in Christ,
Nehru Cad, Bll
Alfons M. Card. Stickler, S.D.B.
197
Alfons Cardinal Stickler
Alfons M. Cardinal Stickler, S.D.B., was born in Neun-
kirchen, Austria, in 1910. While still young he entered the
Salesian Congregation and made his first studies of philosophy
and theology in Austria and Germany, later specializing in
Canon Law at the Roman School of San Apollinare and the
Pontifical Lateran University.
His particular vocation to the study of juridical sciences led
him to teach at the Pontifical Athenaeum Salesianum, first in
Turin and later in Rome. Father Stickler became dean of the
Canon Law School and then rector of the athenaeum, an office
he held from 1958 to 1966.
Placing his superior academic talents at the service of the
Holy See, Father Stickler, after having directed the Pontifical
Institute of Higher Latin Studies, was named Prefect of the
Vatican Library, an institution unequalled in the world on
account of its bibliographic treasures.
In 1983 John Paul I elevated him to the cpiscopal dignity
and made him Pro-Librarian. Afterward, upon making him a
cardinal, he appointed him Librarian and Archivist of the
Holy Roman Church, an office that since its creation in the
sixteenth century has been held by great ecclesiastical figures.
Cardinal Stickler held this office until 1988. Especially nota-
ble among his important responsibilities was his participation
in the commission responsible for developing the new Code
of Canon Law.
198
A Call to Reflection
(Published in the September-October 1994 issue of TFP
Informa, the organ of the Ecuadorean TFP)
A serious and objective study of history shows that all times, all
cultures, and all races have had undeniable differences among their
constituents. There have always been wise men and ignorant men,
classes that rule and classes that obey, rich and poor. Christ Himself
taught, “The poor will always be with you.” The variety of elements
within human socicty is as natural and human as the variety of ele-
ments in the human body. As the body has a diversity of organs, it has
a diversity of functions. Mankind has a like diversity.
Although this diversity is so natural, there is a tendency, when
speaking of society’s components, to consider the differences as
contradictory, as alien to human nature. Thus was born the slogan of
the French Revolution, which set the desire for Jiberty, equality, and
fraternity as the foundation of society, not according to the Christian
concept that all human beings are equal because they are creatures
of the same God and sons of the same Father, but according to the
erroneous concept that there should be no differences of any kind
between human beings. This denial of the diversity of functions
among men contradicts God’s plan in creating the universe and cor-
responds to the rationalist theory that all social inequalities must be
eliminated, through violence if necessary.
That way of thinking characterized the French Revolution and also
led materialistic sociologists to the idea of class struggle, practical
atheism, and the use of tyranny to eliminate everything that could be
considered favorable to the acceptance of the difference of values that
is part of the historical reality of society. Marxism-Leninism, inspired
in this dialectic, rejected the values of the Christian faith and espoused
a materialistic and atheistic philosophy.
The class struggle preached by Marxism received a death blow
with recent events in the Soviet Empire. But the new concept that
must inspire the reestablishment of society destroyed by historical
materialism has not been explored. For this, a new insight into the
understanding of the human being is needed, as well as a deeper
study of the variety of values in society. We need to ask ourselves:
Is the idea of radicalizing unity valid? Or is an in-depth study con-
cerning the transcendental variety of the factors that constitute socie-
ty necessary?
Basing himself on interesting Church documents, this is what the
intelligent and profound thinker Plinio Corréa de Oliveira proposes
to do. He has written a work that can positively help to study and
199
resolve this problem. Entitled “Nobility and Analogous Traditional
Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII,” it deals with a seemingly new
subject: social elites and the seasoned aristocracy of the old nobility.
The author declares that clites must reclaim the social values of the
privileged class, of the families with a heritage, of the families with a
background enriched by titles and traditions.
To some, reviving the social values of the elites may seem
anachronistic and obsolete. Nevertheless, Pope Pius XII, remem-
bering the old and noble traditions of his own family, presents the
nobility of former times not only as holders of titles but, above all,
as holders of a treasure of great virtues that benefited not just elite
families but all of sogiety.
Based on these reflections, J would venture to affirm that im-
morality and corruption have assumed scandalous proportions in
modern society precisely because a wrong criterion of equality has
crept in. In every society, in every culture, in every community,
groups that stand out from the rest by their greater culture, by their
greater morality, by a sense of nobility that not only dignifies an
individual but conquers the admiration and respect of those who
come to know these human values and, even more, Christian virtues,
should be cultivated and fostered. For the same reason, the larger the
community of families characterized by the practice of the human
and Christian virtues, the better oriented society in general will be.
Pius XII left us a whole arsenal of documents in which, especial-
ly addressing the Roman nobility, he exalts the traditional virtues of
the families considered noble and urges the Patriciate to cultivate
qualities and virtues that should adorn a family (or person) that feels
or considers itself noble. He exhorts the elites not only to maintain
their ancestral values of nobility, but to purify them with the teach-
ings of Christ.
For all these reasons I believe the launching of Plinio Corréa de
Oliveira’s book is a prophetic call for contemporary society to make
an examination of conscience regarding the true nobility that distin-
guished the men of the past, and the genuine virtues that must con-
tribute to the building of a more human and Christian society. True
nobility is based not on vanity and selfishness, but on the solid foun-
dation of truth and goodness. We are convinced, therefore, that this
book is a call to a serious reflection that will culminate in the return
to the eternal values of the human being that are a basis of greatness
and likeness with God.
Ibarra, June 21, 1993
Bernardino Cardinal Echeverria Ruiz
200
Bernardino Cardinal Echeverria Ruiz
Bernardino Cardinal Echeverria Ruiz, O.F.M., was born in
Cotacachi, Ecuador, in 1912. He became a Franciscan in 1928
and was ordained in 1937. He studied at the Pontifical Institute
Antoniano in Rome and received his doctorate in Philosophy in
1941. Returning to Ecuador, he filled high posts in the Ecuado-
rean Province of his Order, founding numerous apostolic works
and carrying out important missions in and outside his country.
He was named bishop of Ambato in 1949, a dignity he held
for twenty years. He was secretary, vice-president, and presi-
dent of the Ecuadorean Bishops’ Conference, of which he was
recently named honorary president. He represented this body at
the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (CELAM), of which
he is a founding member, and he was honored with the title of
Assistant to the Apostolic See.
In 1969 he was designated archbishop of Guayaquil, a see
he held until 1989. He revitalized its seminaries and apostolic
movements, built churches, and strove for the establishment of
new religious orders in the Archdiocese. He headed national
movements in the field of pastoral work and the defense of the
Faith, carrying out campaigns with great repercussion in Catholic
opinion for the inclusion of the name of God in the Constitution,
the defense of private education, and the promotion of devotion
to the Most Holy Virgin.
The author of several books and a frequent lecturer, he had
weekly and daily radio and television programs. A Fellow of
the Language Academy, he has received decorations from the
Ecuadorean nation and from other countries, including Spain’s
Commendation of Isabella the Catholic.
After accepting his resignation as archbishop of Guayaquil
in 1989 in accordance with Canon Law, the Holy Father named
him apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Ibarra. As in his
former posts, the Prelate has been tireless in his rebuilding of
destroyed churches and in his vast pastoral work.
He received the cardinal’s hat in the November 1992
Consistory as titular of Saints Nereus and Achilleus, being
the third Ecuadorean to receive this high honor.
201
SANTO DOMINGO EL REAL
DOMINICAN FATHERS
Madrid, January 25, 1993
Dear friend and admired Professor,
I have read closely the original of your magnificent work
“Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of
Pius XII to the Roman Patriciate and Nobility,” which you were
kind enough to send me for review. I am greatly honored by your
confidence in my evaluation and possible comments. In addition, I
admire your ardent desire to be well-founded when launching so
noble a cause, as well as your humility in requesting the opinion of
someone far less knowledgeable than you about the subject, both in
its doctrinal and historical dimensions.
I must say that I found absolutely nothing to criticize or even to
improve in your undertaking. I would, however, like to highlight what
I consider very good:
First, the very writing of a book on this subject. It was needed; and
your selection of a starting point and major basis for discussion could
not have been better, namely, the successive New Year allocutions of
Pius XII to the Roman Patriciate and Nobility. This exceptional Pope
Pacelli, whose mind, heart, and blood were noble, was singularly
attentive to the problems and expectations of his times. Thus, he could
not help but be concerned with the problems of the nobility, to whom
he addressed these allocutions, now opportunely brought to us by a
Brazilian nobleman, in whose person one finds so much devotion to
the Apostolic See and love for Christian civilization.
Second, the timeliness, since the genuine values of the nobility are
currently eclipsed in the post-revolutionary “egalitarianism” and the
inorganic modern democracies. More renown (“nobile” = “nosci-
bilie,” distinguished, excellent, famous) is given to numbers (of votes
or dollars) than to dignifying qualities (knowledge, virtue, art). Yet, as
I heard the great theologian Santiago Ramirez say on several occa-
sions, “Truth is not democratic, but aristocratic.” I hope that your
carefully documented, thoughtful work will bring the traditional
nobility to the forefront, as bearers of dignity, honesty, and humanism
open to God and to the social common good.
Third, 1 think that the harmonic complementarity you establish
between the “preferential option for the poor,” so accentuated in the
202
new evangelization, and the “preferential option for the nobility” is
very just and Christian. Indeed, these two outlooks are not exclu-
sive, but complementary. I believe this is the key: One should love the
best more, and help the neediest more. Hence the two harmonized
preferential options. The charitable option for the indigent should not
diminish the singular esteem deserved by the nobility, especially
when such esteem is at a low ebb in times of widespread egalitarian-
ism. Very much to the point is the information on the high percentage
of canonized saints among the nobility. It was Pius XII who, in 1943,
canonized Saint Margaret of Hungary, O.P., daughter of the King of
Hungary and grand-daughter of the Emperor of Constantinople.
Fourth, in an era of “pacifism” (or peace at any cost), it is also
advantagcous to give thought to the topic of just war, so often waged
by the nobility, whether military or civil and ecclesiastical. The Ma-
gisterium and Theology had and have much to say in this regard, as
Document XT reminds us.
Fifth and last, at a time when democracy, with no discernment or
ulterior ethical resolution, is the sole political dogma for many, it is
opportune to recall the Church’s social doctrine on the forms of gov-
ernment. The Papal Magisterium has incorporated Saint Thomas’
nuanced doctrine, taken up so often by Catholic thinkers and now by
you in Appendix FV of your work.
I could highlight many other interesting points of your work, but
do not wish to unduly lengthen this letter nor to repeat what the
reader will find more adequately and more elaborately expounded
in the book. With these remarks I hope to attest to having read the
original with pleasure and to respond to your friendly gesture.
Yitonus Asatprs 00.
Victorino Rodriguez, O.P.
See page 185 for the biographical data of the Rev. Fr. Victorino
Rodriguez.
203
March 15, 1993
Distinguished Professor,
I have attentively read your work “Nobility and Analogous Tra-
ditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII to the Roman Patriciate
and Nobility,” which you were so kind to send to me.
I deem felicitous your idea of giving wide diffusion to those
documents of Pius XII, which at first glance might seem devoid of rel-
evance to the present day. In fact, however, your lucid and document-
ed commentaries show the foresightedness of the theme discussed by
that Pontiff. Furthermore, you opportunely recall the
beautiful words of Paul VI: “We would like to say many things to
you. Your presence provokes much reflection. So it was also with
Our venerable Predecessors, especially Pope Pius XII of happy
memory. ... We want to believe that the echo of those words, like a
gust of wind swelling a sail, .. . still vibrates in your thoughts, filling
them with the austere and magnanimous appeals that nourish the
vocation preordained for you by Providence and sustain the role still
required of you today by contemporary society.”
Your long experience as professor, congressman, and public figure
makes your commentaries all the more intelligent and instructive,
pleasantly facilitating the reading of the Pontifical documents, which
are of such lofty and estimable value.
I did not find in your pages any error of a theological or other
nature regarding the teachings of the Church. I can only hope that
your excellent work will be given a warm and full reception by the
public for whom it is intended.
Ofna eon or
Fr. Raimondo Spiazzi, O.P.
204
Fr. Raimondo Spiazzi
Fr. Raimondo Spiazzi, O.P., was born in Moneglia, in the
province of Liguria, Italy, in 1918. He was ordained a priest
in 1944 and obtained a doctorate in Sacred Theology at the
Angelicum three years later.
He began his long career as a university professor teaching
Fundamental Theology, Moral Philosophy, and Sociology at
the Studio Domenicano of Turin and Dogmatic Theology at
the Centro Cattolico di Cultura of the same city.
In 1949 he returned to Rome, where he lectured, first at the
University Pro Deo and then at the Angelicum, whose School
of Social Sciences he founded. In 1954 he was appointed dean
of the Institute of Religious Sciences at the Angelicum. In
1957 he began to teach Pastoral Theology at the Pontifical
Lateran University, and, in 1967, Dogmatic Theology at the
Center of Theology for the Laity of the Vicariate of Rome,
becoming its dean in 1987.
Father Spiazzi served as Apostolic Visitor to the seminaries
in Lombardy and Milan and as Provincial of the Dominican
Order for Piedmont and Liguria. Paul VI personally nominated
him a peritus of the Second Vatican Council.
He is now consultant to the Congregation for Catholic
Education and member of several study commissions of the
Vatican congregations and the Vicariate of Rome. He also be-
longs to the Pontifical Academy of Our Lady Immaculate,
the Pontifical Roman Theological Academy, and the Pontifical
Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He is rector of the Basilica
of San Sisto Vecchio on the Appian Way.
Father Spiazzi has published numerous books and over
2,000 articles. Many of the latter have appeared in Italian and
foreign magazines.
205
July 20, 1993
My Dear Juan Miguel,
I received your missive of the Sth along with the beautiful work
of Prof. Plinio Corréa de Oliveira, your distinguished founder: “No-
bility and Analogous Traditional Elites...” You have given me a
present of great value, a work whose scientific, historical, sociologi-
cal, human, and Christian wisdom is inestimable. I believe that with
my 81 years, my 55 years of professorship and predominantly
socio-juridical study, my 50 years in this elevated lookout that is
Rome, I have some claim to be able to judge it and above all
appreciate it. I repeat: It is a work of a wisdom and equity of judgment
that can hardly be matched by so many books, which are excellent if
you will, but lack what we could call a great thinker’s charism of
knowledge and experience. For me, it is not so much the documental
basis as the elaborations of Professor Corréa de Oliveira, who ranges
over the fields of history, social psychology, philosophy, theology,
and Christian ethics with profound insight and analytical capacity.
In short, Professor Corréa de Oliveira is a great MASTER who
deserves to figure at the head of this elite class.
The work’s presentation is on par with its content; like the work’s
theme, it is noble. ...
My congratulations. May it have the diffusion it merits.
Your most affectionate friend,
Go ulGed
Fr. Anastasio Gutiérrez, C.ML.F.
Mr. Juan Miguel Montes
Director of the TFP Bureau
Rome
See page 188 for the biographical data of the Rev. Fr. Anastasio
Gutiérrez.
206
Excerpts from Georges Bordonove’s
foreword to the book’s French edition
Prof. Corréa de Oliveira ranks among the clear-sighted minds that
perceive, with an almost painful sharpness, the metamorphosis un-
derway in today’s soctety, whose final features one cannot foresee.
He fears, not without reason, that the combined effect of a galloping
progress and a mistaken egalitarianism will eventually obliterate the
individual by the monstrous leveling [of society]. It is in this per-
spective that he identifies, with Pius XII, the mission the patriciate
has, unless it prefers to scuttle itself and disappear. In other words,
he invites the elites not to dwell in the lamentation of vanished
grandeur, not to estrange themselves from society, but rather to
resolutely enter the active life, to place their talents, their heritage of
experience, their family traditions, and even their way of being, at
the service of society, with the sole concern for the common good... .
This work is remarkable in all aspects, notably for the abundance
and rigorous exactness of its documentation, the author’s universal
culture, his solid argumentation, and the transparency of his thought.
The reader will also appreciate the Professor’s prospective effort
when he addresses the question of the world’s future. .. . It proposes
an itinerary; it erects the first landmarks for the road to be followed.
Is this the announcement of that twenty-first century which, it has
been said, will either be mystical or will not be at all?
Georges Bordonove
The renowned historian Georges Bordonove was bom on
May 25, 1920, in Enghien (Seine-et-Oise), France. He studied
at the Licée Fontanes and at the Literature and Law School of
Poitiers, graduating in Literature and Law. The author of
almost 70 books and essays, numerous articles and short
stories, several of them award-winning (Grand Prix des Li-
braires de France, 1959; Prix Bretagne, 1963), Bordonove is a
Knight of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the National
Order of Merit, and Officier des Arts et des Lettres.
Other Works
208
SECRETARIA DI STATO
Do
SUA SANTITA
Vatican Palace, February 26, 1949
Illustrious Sir,
Moved by your filial dedication and piety, you offered the Holy
Father the book “In Defense of Catholic Action,” in which you reveal
perfect care and persevering diligence.
His Holiness is very pleased with you for having explained and
defended Catholic Action—of which you have a complete knowledge
and for which you have great esteem—with penetration and clarity so
that it has become clear to all how important it is to study and promote
this auxiliary form of the hierarchical apostolate.
The August Pontiff hopes with ali his heart that this work of yours
results in rich and mature fruits and that from it you may harvest
neither small nor few consolations. And as a pledge that it be so, he
grants you the Apostolic Benediction.
Meanwhile, with due consideration, I declare myself,
Devotedly yours,
Sbd
J. B. Montini
Substitute
Dr. Plinio Corréa de Oliveira
President of Catholic Action
Archdiocese of SAo Paulo, Brazil
209
Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini
Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul V1, was
born in Lombardy, Italy, in 1897. After his ordination in 1920,
he pursued studies at the Pontifical Academy of Noble Eccle-
siastics and the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1924 he
began 30 ycars of service in the Secretariat of State; as under-
secretary from 1937 until 1954, he was closely associated with
Pius XII.
He was ordained archbishop of Milan in 1954, and was in-
ducted into the College of Cardinals in 1958. He was elevated
to the Papacy In 1963.
He reconvened the Second Vatican Council. The main thrust
of his pontificate was toward institutionalizing the trends of the
Council.
He died in 1978.
210
fa,
SACRE CONGREGATION Rome, December 2, 1964
OF SEMINARIES
AND UNIVERSITIES
Most Reverend Excellency,
Only now have we been able to read the ample and profound study
of the illustrious Professor Plinio Corréa de Oliveira, of the Pontifical
Catholic University of Sao Paulo, on the important theme “The
Freedom of the Church in the Communist State” (third enlarged
edition, S40 Paulo, 1964), which your Most Reverend Excellency
was kind enough to send to this Sacred Congregation with the very
kind letter that reached our offices this past November.
At the same time that we express to you our sincere gratitude, we
congratulate Your Excellency and the eminent author, justly cele-
brated for his philosophical, historical, and sociological knowledge,
and we wish the widest circulation for this compact pamphlet, which
is a most faithful echo of all the Documents of the supreme Magis-
terium of the Church, including the luminous encyclicals “Mater et
Magistra” of John XXIII and “Ecclesiam Suam” of Paul VI, happily
reigning.
May Our Lord grant that all Catholics comprehend the necessity
of being united “in uno sensu eademque sententia” in order to avoid
the illusions, deceits, and dangers which today threaten His Church
internally.
With sentiments of particular esteem and consideration, with
all my heart I profess myself once again to Your Most Reverend
Excellency
Most devoted in Jesus Christ
SC ar Y. firterde
G. Card. Pizzardo
~ hs bff p
Dino Staffa, Secretary
Most Reverend Excellency
Antonio de Castro Mayer
Bishop of Campos
211
Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo
Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo was born in Savona, Italy, in
1877, and was ordained in 1903. He was named an archbishop
in 1930 and a cardinal in 1937.
His service to the Church spanned the reigns of five popes.
He served on several congregations, commissions, and in other
capacities, including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith and the commissions for biblical studies and the revision
of the Code of Canon Law. Serving also in the Vatican diplo-
matic corps, he was one of the key negotiators of the 1929
Lateran Treaty.
Although chairman of one of the preparatory commissions
for the Second Vatican Council, he took no part in the Coun-
cil’s debate.
Cardinal Pizzardo died in Rome in 1970 at 93, the oldest of
the 131-member College of Cardinals.
Archbishop Dino Staffa
Archbishop Dino Staffa was born in Fabriago, Italy, in 1906.
He was ordained for his native diocese of Imola in 1929, but
soon after was sent to Rome for higher studies. He served in
various Roman Congregations, as a professor of Canon Law at
the Pontifical Lateran University, and on various Vatican courts,
including as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic
Signatura from 1969 until his death.
He was raised to the episcopate in 1960 and created a
cardinal in 1967.
His writings include commentaries on Canon Law, histo-
ries of the Pontifical and other ecclesiastical academies and
of Apostolic delegations, and works on the freedom of Catho-
lic schools.
Cardinal Staffa died in 1977.
Plinio Correa
MOLI Kt
ey” he author of 15
‘books and over
2,500 in-depth articles
and essays, Plinio
Corréa de Oliveira held
the chair of Modern and
Contemporary History at
io uCom exoy stub uCer-y Mt @rcnvaCo)bCe
University of Sao Paulo,
Brazil. He was also the
founder of the Brazilian
Society for the Defense
of Tradition, Family and Property and served as its
president from its inception in 1960 until his death in 1995.
His book Revolution and Counter-Revolution has inspired the
founding of the world’s largest network of autonomous anticom-
munist organizations sharing the same ideals. At the time of his
death in 1995, the Societies for the Defense of Tradition, Family
and Property (TFPs) and like organizations had spread to 25
countries on 6 continents. This treatise has become the bedside
book of countless people associated with these organizations the
world over.
His word and pen were always at the service of Christian
Civilization. A statement of the Holy See regarding his most
widely circulated book, The Church in the Communist State: The
Impossible Coexistence, can
fittingly be used to describe his TT ait
entire life’s intellectual work: || | i
“a most faithful echo of all the
Documents of the Supreme
Magisterium of the Church.”
Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11